The Rooks
(after Rimbaud)
O Lord, when fields are frozen
and the last toll of the angelus
fades from defeated villages
and all the flowers have gone -
then, bring them whacking down in flocks
from heaven, the delighting rooks
Weird army with your raucous cries,
bitter winds attack your nests.
Hark! by the river’s yellowed wastes,
past old wayside Calvaries,
hark! along each ditch and gulley:
orders to disperse and rally.
In your thousands, wheel over France’s
winter fields where dead men lie -
the dead from just the other day -
bring passers-by to their senses.
Keening in funereal black
call them to mind, call us back.
From your lookout up the oak’s mast
screened by night’s sorcery,
dear saints, let the small birds be.
Look instead, down there, held fast
in the grass below the trees:
war’s eternal detainees.
Page(s) 5
magazine list
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- Agenda
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- Paper, The
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- Poetry Salzburg Review
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- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
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- Shearsman
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- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
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- Yellow Crane, The