Recently I read two poems which I want to share without much commentary – partly because they speak for themselves.
The first is by Primo Levi, the Italian chemist and resistance fighter, who survived the Auschwitz death camp and thereafter wrote books of astonishing grace and hope about agonizing tragedy and ultimate evil. In this poem he writes about the child turned into volcanic stone at Pompeii 2,000 years ago, the young girl Anne Frank converted into ashes in Bergen-Belsen and an unknown child vaporized at Hiroshima.
Words of Caution
Since the anguish of each belongs to us all
We’re still living yours, scrawny little girl
Clinging convulsively to your mother
As if you wanted to get back inside her
When the sky went black that afternoon.
To no avail, because the sky, turned poison,
Infiltrated the shut windows of your quiet
House with its thick walls to find you
Happy before in your song and timid laughter.
The centuries have passed, the ash has turned to stone,
Locking in these gentle limbs forever.
So you stay with us, contorted plaster cast,
Endless agony, horrific witness
To how our proud seed matters to the gods.
But there’s nothing left for us of your faraway sister,
The girl from Holland walled up in four walls
Who wrote about her childhood without a tomorrow:
Her quiet ashes have been spread by the wind,
Her brief life held inside a crumpled notebook.
Nothing’s left of the Hiroshima schoolgirl,
Shadow transfixed on the wall by the light of a thousand suns,
Victim sacrificed on the altar of fear.
Masters of the earth, lords of new poisons,
Sad secret guardians of definitive thunder,
The afflictions heaven offers us are sufficient.
Stop and consider before you push the button.
So much suffering and horror in the world. Think, for instance, of the hate-filled massacre in Orlando this week which shuddered around the world. And here at home lately I find it hard to get out of my mind the pure evil of fishermen being weighed down with an anchor and thrown into the sea to terrible, struggling deaths. As if to give some comfort a friend sends me a poem by Anna Akhmatova I have never seen. She was the great Russian poetess who suffered under Stalin’s appalling despotism but never lost faith and hope. Here is her beautiful poem instructing us not to despair.
Poem
Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold
Death’s great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?
By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies
And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined dirty houses –
something not known to anyone at all
But wild in our breast for centuries.
Night after night on the great Essequibo the moon path gleams on the wide water. Impossible to despair.
