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1918 was een jaar waarin
sommige van de grootste War Poets,
denken we maar aan Wilfred Owen of Isaac Rosenberg, het leven lieten. Vandaag
breng ik in Zondag Frontpoëziedag
Rosenbergs beklijvende Dead Mans Dump.
The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight,
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
To stay the flood of brutish men
Upon our brothers dear.
The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched,
Their shut mouths made no moan.
They lie there huddled, friend
and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of
woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now.
Earth has waited for them,
All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay:
Now she has them at last!
In the strength of their strength
Suspended--stopped and held.
What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?
Earth! have they gone into you!
Somewhere they must have gone,
And flung on your hard back
Is their soul's sack
Emptied of God-ancestralled
essences.
Who hurled them out? Who hurled?
None saw their spirits' shadow
shake the grass,
Or stood aside for the half used
life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and
the doomed mouth,
When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their
youth.
What of us who, flung on the
shrieking pyre,
Walk, our usual thoughts
untouched,
Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,
Immortal seeming ever?
Perhaps when the flames beat
loud on us,
A fear may choke in our veins
And the startled blood may stop.
The air is loud with death,
The dark air spurts with fire,
The explosions ceaseless are.
Timelessly now, some minutes
past,
Those dead strode time with
vigorous life,
Till the shrapnel called `An
end!'
But not to all. In bleeding
pangs
Some borne on stretchers dreamed
of home,
Dear things, war-blotted from
their hearts.
Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel
Seared by the jagged fire, the
iron love,
The impetuous storm of savage
love.
Dark Earth! dark Heavens!
swinging in chemic smoke,
What dead are born when you kiss each
soundless soul
With lightning and thunder from your mined
heart,
Which man's self dug, and his
blind fingers loosed?
A man's brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer's face;
His shook shoulders slipped
their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too
deep
For human tenderness.
They left this dead with the older dead,
Stretched at the cross roads.
Burnt black by strange decay
Their sinister faces lie,
The lid over each eye,
The grass and coloured clay
More motion have than they,
Joined to the great sunk
silences.
Here is one not long dead;
His dark hearing caught our far
wheels,
And the choked soul stretched
weak hands
To reach the living word the far
wheels said,
The blood-dazed intelligence
beating for light,
Crying through the suspense of
the far torturing wheels
Swift for the end to break
Or the wheels to break,
Cried as the tide of the world
broke over his sight.
Will they come? Will they ever
come?
Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,
The quivering-bellied mules,
And the rushing wheels all mixed
With his tortured upturned
sight.
So we crashed round the bend,
We heard his weak scream,
We heard his very last sound,
And our wheels grazed his dead
face.
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