Peter Porter
The Snails of Turin
Sifting in a tall house fearing
The Ice Kings and the Major Generals,
I think of the Shakespearean code:
Terror happens in the mind.
A Marxist in a blue suit, looking
Like someone going for an interview,
Tells me his Jewish father was beaten
To death by his mother’s peasant family.
Disaster assembles at the Iron Gate,
Railway trucks are rolling
Over the fanged land — we get our weather
From the outward-looking West.
Yet Spain too fronts the howling ocean:
To be born in the picture of hope
Sends us back to ossuaries,
A long footage of tall foreheads.
Lies are piled higher than the bones
Of two world wars and many limpid
Sons and daughters will succumb to them
In cold despair at the end of life.
In Turin the snails are down three feet;
The future wires the landscape with
Its Electronic Gothic. Not just Winter
But the genius of the world has turned.
Page(s) 17-18
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