BALLAD OF THE TWO WARS

What is a bomb?
Something I can't yet believe.
What is a tomb?
Something I do not see.
And what is a wound in its wounding,
And the shot cutting a vein, and the blood falling
Out of an eye, say, stabbed -- are these things too for me?

Bitter, how bitter, do you remember, in a certain by now long ago,
Anger boiling through in tears on the foul London midnight stair?
I8, I8, I8 -- if a man, yes, I'd have been shifted over into it then,
Into the Grand-To-Do, the last one they called "La Guerre",

With some cross-eyed crossroad finger pointing at me
"On", meaning down to the waiting mud for the long wondering
The "What is it all about?" and the hour coming
With its "Ready for death?" "Hell no, ready for nothing", that's me.

You, man, mumbling that misplaced impossible "a spot of bother",
O brother contemporary -- and most of you the salt of the earth --
What else could you do but go? We shall not forget you,
And that's a fact humanly, not governmentally said;
Nor forgive the present Flanders poppy flaunting ahead towards the next
one,
From "La Der-ders" into "La Prochaine". I have not forgot my dead.

You think this is something new? No. This too becomes Spain,
All of it, all of it's Spain -- with the dial set at Revenge --
No past pageantry of wan mothers and lovers weeping,
Ruined, undone for ever that Spain shall not avenge.

I'm of a mood tonight, boy, marked "Do not touch",
Though somebody like, say, Villon, may have the best of it,
Long dead and safe from the shells and cries and wounds
And the scythes of war mowing ground for our latter-day tombs.

I'm of a mood with Bosch and Zola and Villon
Who brooked no nonsense, who wrote and painted and said
Their NO against foolery, NO against lying, their NO to
The proud-fleshed faber, their NO to the living dead,

The popes and impostors, the critics pragmatic, the pompoms -- to
Prick irony into function by use of the heart and the fact --
Into the washtub with History, for the better showing of it!
Soft, say, à la mode du temps... then the artist became the act.

Blake too -- you'll do well to remember that naked man's announcement:
"It is impossible, yes, for Truth to be told, so's understood
And not be believed" -- Ha -- Blake is the Day of Judgement,
Vengeful, oppressive, peculiar -- Blake's all to the good.

Daddy Hogarth and Faust, Shakespeare, Chaucer and Marlowe,
Goya, Heine and Daumier, and the long-exiled giant, Hugo,
Dante -- what do you think they'd say to you, an artist of hesitations...
Shall I call on these our dead for their answer? "GO,