May 25

1944

Dear Josie,

I have been meaning to write to you all along, to thank you for coming over when I wasn't well, and particularly for writing to me to talk about the poems and to send me to the Kauns. I have been seeing them and I am happy to be in their house; I think you were right about their marriage; it looks very fine, with its perfectly obvious gaps, after the marriages one sees whose gaps are covered with some light weaving that looks like nothing so much as a tiger-trap. They have taken me to some evenings of a Slavic society that has a lot of underground material, and other places; they have introduced me to a Chinese poet and his wife who are now, I think, my friends; but, best of all, I have been to their house a few times. I am very far from a house myself, and there is nothing better than theirs. And so I thank you very much.

What's happened about the play? Mine, very slowly, is beginning to reach paper. My people talk to each other almost all the time now. That was what bothered me most before. But you won't have had any of that. People in your books have always talked to each other.

Thank you, too, for asking for the poems. I've copied them out; the book will appear in the middle of June. I don't know where I'll be by then, but I'll keep in touch with you and Rebecca.

Love,

LETTER TO THE FRONT

I

Women and poets see the truth arrive.
Then it is acted out,
The lives are lost, and all the newsboys shout.

Horror of cities follows, and the maze
Of compromise and grief.
The feeble cry Defeat be my belief.

All the strong agonized men
Wear the hard clothes of war,
Try to remember what they are fighting for.

But in dark weeping helpless moments of peace
Women and poets believe and resist forever:
The blind inventor finds the underground river.

II

Even during war, moments of delicate peace
Arrive; ceaseless the water ripples, love
Speaks through the river in its human voices.
Through every power to affirm and heal
The unknown world suggests the air and golden
Familiar flowers, and the brief glitter of waves,
And dreams, and leads me always to the real.
Even among these calendars of fire.

Sings: There is much to fear, but not our power.
The stars turn over us; let us not fear the many.
All mortal intricacies tremble upon this flower.
Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
We are alive in an hour whose burning face
Looks into our death, death of our dear wish.
And time that will be eating away our flesh
Gives us this moment when blue settles on rose
And evening suddenly seems limitless silver.
The cold wind streaming over the cold hill-grasses
Remembers and remembers. Mountains lift into night.
And I am remembering the face of peace.

3

But the cowards were persistent in their fearing,
Each of us narrowed to one wish he was keeping.

There was no change of heart here; we were keeping
Our deepest wish, meeting with hope this country.
The enemies among us went on fearing
The frontier was too far behind. This fighting
Was clear to us all at last. The belted soldiers
Vanished into white hills that dark was changing.

The train stood naked in flowery midnight changing
All complex marvellous hope to war, and keeping
Among us only the main wish, and the soldiers.
We loved each other, believed in the war; this
country

Meant to us the arrival of the fighting
At home; we began to know what we were fearing.

As continents broke apart, we saw our fearing
Reflect our nations' fears; we acted as changing
Cities at home would act, with one wish, fighting
This threat or falling under it; we were keeping
The knowledge of fiery promises; this country
Struck at our lives, struck deeper than its soldiers.

Those who among us were sure became our soldiers.
The dreams of peace resolved our subtle fearing.
This was the first day of war in a strange country.
Free Catalonia offered that day our changing
Age's hope and resistance, held in its keeping
The war the age must win in love and fighting.

This first day of fighting showed us all men as
soldiers.
It offered one wish for keeping. Hope. Deep fearing.
Our changing spirits awake in the soul's country.

V

Much later I lie in a white seaport night
Of gongs and mystery and bewildered mist,
Giving me a strange harbor in these white
Scenes, white rivers, my white dreams of peace,
And a ship lifted up on a sign of freedom.
Peace sharp and immediate as our winter stars.
A blue sailor with a cargo of guitars.

4

I saw a white ship rise as peace was made
In Spain, the first peace the world would not keep.
The ship pulled away from the harbor where Columbus
Standing on his black pillar sees new worlds;
And suddenly all the people at all the rails
Lifted their hands in a gesture of belief
That climbs among my dreams like a bird flying.
Until the world is lifted by one bird flying
An instant drawing to itself the world.

## VI

Home thoughts from home : we read you every day,
Soldiers of distances. You wish most to be here.
In the strange lands of war, I woke and thought of home
Remembering how war came, I wake and think of you,
In the city of water and stone where I was born,
My home of complex light. What we were fighting for,
In the beginning, in Spain, was not to be defined.
More human than abstract, more direction than end.
Terror arrived intact, lit with the tragic fire
Of hope before its time, tore us from lover and friend.
We came to the violent act with all that we had learned

But now we are that home you dream across a war.
You fight; and we must go in poetry and hope
Moving into the future that noone can escape.
Peace will in time arrive, but war defined our years.
We are like that young saint at the spring who bent
Her face over dry earth the vision told her flowed,
Miring herself. She knew it was water. But for
Herself, it was filth. Later, for all to come
Following her faith, miraculous crystal ran.
O saint, O poet, O wounded of these wars
To find life flowing from the heart of man.
We hold belief. You fight and are maimed and mad.
We believe, though all you want be bed with one
Whose mouth is bread and winXe, whose flesh is home.

## VII

To be a Jew in the twentieth century
Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse,
Wishing to be invisible, you choose
Death of the spirit, the stone insanity.
Accepting, take full life. Full agonies:

5

Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood
Of those who resist, fail, and resist; and God
Reduced to a hostage among hostages.

The gift is torment. Not alone the still
c Torture, isolation; or torture of the flesh.
That may come also. But the accepting wish,
The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee
For every human freedom, suffering to be free,
Daring to live for the impossible.

VIII

Evening, bringing me out of the government building,
Spills her blue air, her great Atlantic clouds
Over my hair, reminds me of my land.
My back to high stone and that man's golden bands
Who said of our time which has only its freedom,
"I will not ever say 'for a free world'
'A better world' or whatever it is -
A man fights to win a war,
To hang on *whilst* to what it his - "
Consider this man in the clothes of a commander.
Remember that his field is bottled fizz.

O the blue air and the nightsound of heartbeats -
Planes or poems or dreams direct as prayer.
The belief in the world, and we can stand with them,
Whoever clearly fights the order of despair.
In spite of the fascist, Málicioso King,
Contractor, business man, and publisher,
Who will hire a man to hire another man
To hire someone to murder the man of strong belief.
Look at him at the Radio City bar;
Remember that he functions best as thief.

O the clouds and the towers are not enough to hide
The little sneer at freedom, the whisper that art died.
Here is the man who changed his name, the man who dyed
his hair;
One praises only his own birth; one only his own whores.
Unable to create or fight or commit suicide,
Will make a job of weakness, be the impotent editor,
The sad and pathic bull always wishing he were
The bullfighter. But we remember the changes that he made,
Screaming "Betrayed!" He forever betrays. He alone is
betrayed.

6

They are all here in this divided time:
Dies the inquisitor against the truth,
Wheeler, Nye, Pegleſ, Hearst, each with his crews,
McCormick, the Representatives whose crime
Is against history, the state, and love.
I hold their dead skulls in my hand; this death
Worked against labor, women, Jews,
Reds, Negroes. But our freedom lives
To fight the war the world must win.
The fevers of confusion's touch
Leap to confusion in the land.
We shall grow and fight again.
The sickness of our divided state
Calls to the anger and the great
Imaginative gifts of man.
The enemy does his rigid work.
We live fighting in that dark.
Let all the living fight in proof
They start the world this war must win.

## IX

Among all the waste there are the intense stories
And tellers of stories. One saw a peasant die.
One guarded a soldier through disease. And one
Saw all the women look at each other in hope.
And came back, saying, "All things must be known."

They come home to the rat-faced investigator
Who sneers and asks, "Who is your favorite poet?"
Voices of scissors and grinders asking their questions:
"How did you ever happen to be against fascism?"
And they remember the general's white hair,
The food-administrator, alone and full of tears.

They come home to the powder-plant at twilight,
The girls emerging like discolored shadows.
But this is a land where there is time, and time;
This is the country where there is time for thinking.
"Is he a 'fellow-traveler'? - No. - Are you sure? - No. -"
The fear. Voices of clawhammers and spikes clinking.

If they bomb the cities, they must offer the choice.
Taking away the sons, they must create a reason.
The cities and women cry in a frightful voice,
"I care not who makes the laws, let me make the sons."
But look at their eyes, like drinking animals'

8

O on the wasted midnight of our pain

Remember the wasted ones, lost as surely as soldiers

Surrendered to the barbarians, gone down under centuries

Of the starved spirit, in desperate mortal midnight

With the pure throats and tries of blessing, the clearest

Fountains of mercy and continual love.

These years know separation. O the future shining

In far countries or suddenly at home in a look, in

a season,

In music freeing a new myth among the male

Steep landscapes, the familiar cliffs, trees, towers

That stand and assert the earth, saying: "Come here,

come to me.

Here are your children." Not as traditional man

But love's great insight - "your children and your song."

Coming close to the source of belief, these have created
Resistance, the flowering fire of memory,

Given the bread and the dance and the breathing midnight.

Nothing has been begun. No peace, no word of marvellous

Possible hillsides, the warm lips of the living

Who fought for the spirit's grace among despair,

Beginning with signs of belief, offered in time of war,

As I now send you, for a beginning, praise.