Evening in Stepney—For M
1
The greenness after sterile stone,
Not one stone left upon another;
The augury unforeseen of a listening April.
Behind the boarded window,
Socket of havoc yet fractional eye of home,
Out-flowing and imperative the Sonata.
Under the acacias a bench evening-wet.
Not one stone left upon another
In the mind, or in the heart.
A music uttering stillness, word
Emancipate made voluminously audible
Yet ever the wooer resolving the body wooed,
This feverless interplay between polarities
We too have sometime heard;
Or hear with the ear of our desire,
And hear with pain, for the lending is evanescent:
Return of a wind to water-bruise the corn.
So now, the severely harmonious
Declaration of peace and pledge of the reunion
Of the lover and his friend, of the sister and brother,
Rolled out over ruins; all our fragments;
Pyre of the world’s parsimony and mine.
2
The circle of greensward evening-lit,
And each house taciturn to its neighbour.
The destruction of a city is not caused by fire;
What many have lost begets a ghostlier heritage
Or hails the unknown horizon; workaday street
A travel-ordained encounter, the breakable family
Fortified in defeat by the soldering air.
The destruction is in the rejection of a common weal;
Agony’s open abyss or the fate of an orphanage,
Mass-festering, mass-freezing or mass-burial,
Crime’s worm is in ourselves
Who crumble and are the destroyer.
Time to repair the infirmary soon, for tissue torn;
To plan the adroit, repetitive memorial.
3
Reconciled to stone yet glad of greenness
( The grass kinder than pity ),
Lonely no less because my crescent of ground,
Authentic configuration between two farewells,
Virginal as all truth is had been trodden before me,
Under the acacias rainy and evening-sweet
I heard the unrenderable word of the Sonata,
The accidental equation of our souls.
No longer with the exceeded ear, the shell’s
Poor labyrinth, harbour of sighing;
Full measure not to be contained that more than ocean
Caught me into the dimension of its own desire:
I heard the question a mounting curve and the answer poised to alleviate,
Rich equilibrium restorative to restore me;
Fecundity of seas eternally dying,
Jubilant re-engendering of the wave.
Some footsure lives have their allotted goals;
Nailed to a bench the skeleton town between us
( Shackles and relics, rust-corroded wire ),
Pathless I chose the obedient progression
of the pause, to admit death and to arrive;
To leave you and to come back to you no-where bound,
A humbler desert redeemed by waterfalls.
4
These make-shift years, in areas
Bred by this capital, the mean tenements
My deeds condone, my dutiful lips deplore,
More sere than once, a trifle more collapsible,
Some like the rook’s castle left to rot,
The sky for a ceiling, droppings on the floor,
Some cracked but still precariously permanent,
Consent to vanish at sundown without pathos,
Dusk into dusk; the War
Has cropped to chimney-height the occasional spire;
What towers above roof-level is intangible,
Yesterday’s hope, and the confusion of fear
Anaesthetizing a city not yet born.
Intact though nebulous monument!
Across and across it move
The search-lights, reckoning hate on a hidden clock.
Could tears with tears confer.
I see through a dark lens your hamlet burned;
The sawdust child, the seven-year-old toy
That tore in half too easily;
Drowned men who have haunted
History’s archipelago, England’s rock;
And the piston forearm catching the furnace glare;
Brotherhood sealed as the pointed bayonet struck;
The joy re-vindicated, and the sin repented.
Near to us now the rose draws every distance
Deeply into the haven of the eye, and the breast-feather of a dove
Gave to me grows infinite in my hand.
5
The stillness after the treasure spent,
Not one chore spared to recreate you;
The closing-in of the night on a chance oasis.
Condemned to a limbo sombre,
Resigned to winter, an ember of the Sonata
Latent in mind remembering, buried in heart.
No thinned chord threadbare to requite you;
Sun that you were; my warmth, who waned beside you,
Under the acacias quenched and evening-gaunt.
Under the acacias, ending as I began,
I spoke as if you had willed it, to the aloof
Tight-fisted leaves, to the desolation of April;
( But neither of spring nor fall;
We have loved a supernal benevolence, orient weather );
To the slum, and to Europe’s tomb; to the starveling opposite,
Shut house over against me, shored by grief;
Home to the singular hearth all flesh may come,
When the two or three have agreed to agree together.
I spoke under the correction of that wall
We turn our face to, not for known relief.
The rest a fasting; Time’s interior hush;
Until the first and the last achieve communion.
Tooth for a tooth, we have said, and bomb for bomb;
Down by the rat-pestilent sewer pullulate
Our children vainly arrayed like Solomon,
How fieldless, and how venerably in bud;
The tank rolls on beneath the rainbow’s arch;
Until the proved companion
Dares to revive in strangers, each for each,
In plain men broken majestically as bread.
Moved by a slow miracle mountains crash.
6
Learn to give praise, not grieve;
Again to the dire altar
We are woven alive,
Innumerable yet a whole thank-offering.
Let the mortal vapour of mingled evil and good,
Though heavy, ascend;
For this up-faltering,
These fumes, increase of our necessity,
The unready green of the weed,
Is fuel for the downward-bending
The sod-quickening fire;
Grass-mowings we are, the groundsell of suffering,
A people unripe for prayer.
Yet we desire the humility of the earth
Before the season of bearing,
Provident growth at passion’s hard expense;
We desire to be filled with the knowledge
Of man’s worth in ruins, nor offend his ruins;
Patient to lift oppression from a province
( For breath de-flowered the fully-inhaled reprieve );
To feel with friends the wind
Of dark-blue summer smoothing out sea-plumage;
Beyond desire desiring to conceive
The new town soaring,
Means to a new end;
Still ignorant of these birth-throes in advance,
Not great yet with the costliness of heaven, Our destiny to endure the rebuke of love,
One with another, pardonable, in ruins.
We look for the gift ungiven but in-graven,
A wound of light in the forehead of the blind.
