The Great Captains

“THE GREAT CAPTAINS”

“THE GREAT CAPTAINS”

The great Captains, do they sleep

Careless as other men, with dangling arm?

Or do they roll from side to side,

Wide-eyed and sweating through the night,

Shuddering at every bird-cry, starting up

With hammering heart as distant doorlatch clicks,

Or nightwind carries nearer far-off feet?

Does dawn still find them living through the past,

Where never-ending film to the numb brain

Shows tumbled bodies, killed by directive,

Smashed faces grinning in the drizzling dawn,

And victory only lull before the same

Rehearsal yet again, and yet again?

The great Captains, do they ever weep

Before tedium drags them down to sleep?

PART ONE

THE JOURNEY TO THE WEST

At the old world’s edge, the fuchsia was in flower

And bugloss and poppy stood among the corn.

Isca Legionis, Verulamium, even Londinium,

Slept out the length of some long afternoon.

From Corstopitum down to Chichester

Foxglove and eglantine

Grew up towards the sunlight

From between the crumbling stones.

But when the moon came out along the Roman roads,

Along three thousand miles of weed-grown tracks,

Roads straight as arrows from York to Colchester

And back from Exeter to York again,

In the still air the marching feet still echoed,

And above the lonely peewit’s cry

The proud centurion’s voice set trembling

The dangling pine cones in the wood.

No, they are gone. It is all afternoon.

The distant thunder speaks in the hills

But goes unheard.

The blood-red sun will sink, to light another world.

Here in the country villas paint flakes from the columns,

And the ghosts, the tired gay ones,

Sit by the sunlit vineyard wall, yawning,

And speculating on predestination.

Now it is all late summer’s afternoon,

Where the cow nuzzles her bursting udders,

Lowing to be milked,

And the lazy bees mumble as they stagger

Among the pitifully moss-grown urns.