Pamiatnik - Memorial of Bittersweet

This is the place
Of indescribable expression, like the look on the face of a certain morning.
This is the house
Where so much of much, so much of nothing happens.
This is the day
And the night
And the dawn
And the tear
Coming out of the wine or the heart temporarily sterile.
This is the place of near-despair, the crucible of world-sorrows.

This is the place
Of the news-letter bleeding out a lynching;
Cell of ferocity, seam of defeat, zone of continuation.
This is the place of Spain-my-Spain -
These agonies, laced with individual sorrows.
This is the house of time withering away,
And time running, and time at a loss,
Like a foot forever on the stair, and the return of dying called winter.
It is no place of linked easy lovers;
Its temper is bitter-sweet, its pulse is called poetry,
Its heart is a roaring red, its conscience intransigent.
(O it can be soft and sweet too - how long how long, my darling?)
Here often sits December, with the wan drip of the month
Giving the black-out, when the peasants play at Brueghel on the roads.
It can hate and love and scorn in one, it is cruel;
It is a roaring red, I said, under its proud-necked sufficiency.
It sits in judgement on the creeping and racing of the century
Under the warring flags of victories and assassinations
And the waves rising and rising
Of the wrath of outraged humanity -
Judges, and fiercely finds wanting.

There is nothing we can do for it, nothing, oh nothing;
It hates us, it hates us, it hates us -
It is like me,
It is like life.

(1937)