War
Risen is the sleeper from the vaulted past,
Risen from deep under and returned at last.
Huge and strange he looms there, in the twilight mist,
And he snuffs the moon out with a coal-black fist.
Cities teem with hubbub of the thickening dusk,
Frost and shadow swaddled in an alien husk;
Street-sounds of the markets halt their rounds and freeze.
Silence now. And no man knows, yet each man sees.
People in the alleys feel him on their trail.
Questions. And no answers. Faces turning pale.
Swinging in the distance, bells are whining thin.
Every beard is trembling on its pointed chin.
He’s begun his danse macabre where the hilltops arch,
And he’s screaming: “All you soldiers, forward march.”
Listen to the pounding of his swart brow’s pulse;
That jangling is his necklace of a thousand skulls.
Tower-tall he lumbers from the sun’s last ray;
Bloody torrents follow on the heels of day.
Countless are the corpses that the swamp has spilt;
Droppings of the death-bird are their last white quilt.
[Here three first-draft stanzas, partly in illegible handwriting and
partly repetitious in effect, have been omitted. PV]
Forest after forest feeds the flaming jaws;
Yellow bats of arson flex their zigzag claws.
Like a furnace helot, he hacks his poker deep,
Stoking up the embers to their wildest leap.
Hurtling without outcry into nightmare’s gut,
Metropolis is choking on its own pale soot.
Over glowing rubble he gives a giant lurch;
Through frantic skies he three times waves his torch, –
Mirrored in the hurricane of mangled clouds,
In the dead cold desert of the midnight shrouds.
Night itself dries up beneath his farflung fire;
Sodom has collapsed upon its funeral pyre.
Translated by Peter Viereck
Page(s) 253
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