Return by Malcolm Lewis

Here is the soldier home from the War,
sailing into Cardiff. He’s startled after Palestine
by the colours on the ridge,
dead bracken, glossy, like wet army cottons,
purple coppice he can’t identify,
the mossy green of fir trees that weren’t there
when he volunteered.

The cold cuts through the suit
bought from the tallest of the Lascars,
the cuffs, inches short of his wrists,
expose his skin, now as dark as theirs,
but collier-white before he went. He looks
like them, but Christ, he’d hardly kept up.
Only pennies rub in his pocket –
the captain had skint him, the Scotch bastard.

Posted missing back at Easter,
he’d not written, couldn’t risk
the censor checking on his letter.
He’ll stay on board till it’s dark,
jump the wall, thread the back streets north,
then – the freedom of the frozen tracks –
up and over the top, past the hill farms’ yowling sentries,
down to the town where ghosts parade.

by Malcolm Lewis

Advertisement

Winged God by R. S. Thomas

All men. Or shall we say,
not chauvinistic, all
people, it is all
people? Beasts manure
the ground, nibble to
promote growth; but man,
the consumer, swallows
like the god of mythology
his own kind. Beasts walk
among birds and never
do the birds scare; but the human,
that alienating shadow
with the Bible under the one
arm and under the other
the bomb, as often
drawn as he is repelled
by the stranger waiting for him
in the mirror – how
can he return home
when his gaze forages
beyond the stars? Pity him,
then, this winged god, rupturer
of gravity's control
accelerating on and
outward in the afterglow
of a receding laughter?
 
by R. S. Thomas
from No Truce With The Furies (1995) 

After Plodding Year After Year by Georgy Ivanov

After plodding year after year

through towns in an alien land,

we have ground enough to despair –

and despair is where we must end.

 

For despair is our final refuge –

as if, midwinter, we had come

from Vespers in a nearby church,

through Russian snow, to our home.

 

by Георгий Владимирович Иванов (Georgii Vladimirovich Ivanov)

(1958)

by Robert Chandler

After Plodding Year After Year by Georgy Ivanov

After plodding year after year

through towns in an alien land,

we have ground enough to despair –

and despair is where we must end.

 

For despair is our final refuge –

as if, in midwinter, we had come

from Vespers in a nearby church,

through Russian snow, to our home.

 

by Георгий Владимирович Иванов (Georgii Vladimirovich Ivanov)

(1958)

translated by Robert Chandler