Among Those Killed In The Dawn Raid Was A Man Aged A Hundred by Dylan Thomas

When the morning was waking over the war
He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died,
The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide,
He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone
And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.
Tell his street on its back he stopped a sun
And the craters of his eyes grew springshoots and fire
When all the keys shot from the locks, and rang.
Dig no more for the chains of his grey-haired heart.
The heavenly ambulance drawn by a wound
Assembling waits for the spade’s ring on the cage.
O keep his bones away from the common cart,
The morning is flying on the wings of his age
And a hundred storks perch on the sun’s right hand.

By Dylan Thomas
(July 1941)

A recording of Dylan Thomas reciting his poem.

Additional information: I have seen online a number of sources have ‘springshots’ instead of ‘springshoots’. The book I reference, and the above clip where you can hear the poet himself reciting the poem, confirms it is ‘springshoot’ . I can only imagine those sources copied each other or there is some alternate ‘American English’ version I am unfamiliar with.

Characteristically, the sonnet refuses to let the natural triumph of the centenarian’s death be obscured by piety, officialese or propaganda. Instead, it records the events with a quiet irony – that such an old man should need to be killed by a bomb. The flat title was an actual headline in a newspaper. With an even crueller irony. Thomas considered, as a title for the second part of ‘Ceremony After a Fire Raid’ known as ‘Among Those Burned to Death was a Child Aged a Few Hours’.

Observation Post: Forward Area by Alun Lewis

The thorns are bleached and brittle,
The empty folds decay,
Rooftrees creak in the silence
Of inarticulate dismay.

Drought denudes the planting;
In the dry red heat
Dawn spills its ghostly water,
Black heads on the wheat.

Some evil presence quenches
The vagrant drunken theme
Of the swart and skinny goatherd
And the black goats of his dream.

A darker beast than poverty
Transfixed the crouching peasants there,
And tore the votive tablets down
And filled the children with such fear.

The cowdung fires guttered out,
The wizened women cried,
The bridegroom lay trembling,
And rigid the bride.

Love could be had for nothing.
And where is love now?
Gone with the shambling oxen,
Gone with the broken plough,
Death lives here now.

by Alun Lewis

Paramilitary Lover by Samantha Wynne Rhydderch

He strokes my neck like the barrel of a rifle

he might have killed that German with,

his boots by the door, susceptible to the cold.

I glow by the fire in tandem with

the rosewood dresser, impartial to flames,

me with a passion for granite, him

with his head shaved against the night,

shedding his armour plate by plate.

I sleep under his shield, enfolded

in an English flag I think will

become my shroud. While I thrill

among the lilies, placing a chestnut

on the grate like a move in chess,

I see the incentive of lace

defeat artillery hands down.


by Samantha Wynne Rhydderch

Interesting info: Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, sometimes referred to as S. W. Rhydderch, has published two collections, Rockclimbing in Silk (Seren, 2001), and Not in These Shoes (Picador, 2008), which was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2009.

Granite [Excerpt] by Anna Prismanova

One might suppose that I shall not forget you,

but that won't be because I loved you so,

rather because you chanced to be the fire

which I myself employed to hew my soul.



by Анна Семёновна Присманова (Anna Semyonovna Prismanova)
a.k.a. Анна Симоновна Присман (Anna Simonovna Prisman)
(late 1930s or early 1940s?)
translated by Robert Chandler

Interesting info: She is considered comparable to her contemporary, the American poet, Louise Bogan and challenged traditional ideas of femininity in her poetry as seen in this closing stanza of the poem Granite

The Tears of Lilith by Clark Ashton Smith

O lovely demon, half-divine!

Hemlock and hydromel and gall,

Honey and aconite and wine

Mingle to make thatmouth of thine-

 

Thy mouth I love: but most of all

It is thy tears that I desire-

Thy tears, like fountain-drops that fall

In garden red,Satanical;

 

Or like the tears of mist and fire,

Wept by the moon, that wizards use

to secret runes when they require

Some silver philtre,sweet and dire.

 

By Clark Ashton Smith