in Poems (Author's Poems)
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
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in Poems (Author's Poems)
They never forgot
that even the most dreadful martyrdom must run its course
anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
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in Poems (Author's Poems)
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the God had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
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in Poems (Author's Poems)
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
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in Poems (Author's Poems)
Cold, impossible, ahead
Lifts the mountain' s lovely head
Whose white waterfall could bless
Travellers in their last distress.
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September 1,1939
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
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in Poems (Author's Poems)
September 1,1939
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
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in Poems (Author's Poems)
Thoughts of his own death,
like the distant roll
of thunder at a picnic.
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in Poems (Author's Poems)
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
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in Poems (Author's Poems)
Spain
And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss, o show us
History the operator, the
Organiser, Time the refreshing river."
And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,
Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin' s plucky canton?
Intervene. Descend as a dove or
a furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend.
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