Martin Bennett
Partisans
Where are you, guerrillas of the valleys,
Tarzan, Riccio, Sparviero, Saetta, Ulysses?
Many are sleeping in decorous tombs;
Those left alive now have white hair
And chronicle for their children
How, in a time blurred in memory,
They broke the siege of the Germans
There where a ski-lift rises below.
Some buy and sell plots of land,
Others nibble at a State Pension
Or gather wrinkles on the local council.
No demob for us: Old, but not fallen,
Here we are again, tramping back into the mountains,
Slow, panting, with the odd strapped knee,
However many winters heaped on our backs.
The footpath’s steep slope won’t be easy;
Tonight our beds’ll be hard, likewise the bread.
Well glance at each other, almost strangers,
Mistrustful, some tetchy, some shady...
Like back then, we shall be on our guard
Lest, in the dawn, the enemy surprise us.
Which enemy? Each is the enemy of each,
Cut of f behind his own private frontier,
The right hand the enemy of the left one.
Old. but not fallen, enemies of yourselves:
The war for us has never ended...
Page(s) 131-132
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