BY DAVID SCOTT KASTAN
PREFACE
A recent traveler in Granada, remembering the gaiety that had greeted him on an earlier visit, wondered why the place seemed so sad. The answer came to him at last: “This was a city that had killed its poet.” He was talking, of course, of the great Federico García Lorca, murdered by Franco’s bullies during the Spanish Civil War.
But are there not many cities and many places that kill their poets? Places nearer home than Granada and the Albaicín? The poets, true, are humbler than Lorca (for such genius is a seed as rare as a roc’s egg), and the deaths are less brutal, more subtle, more civilized. Against us, luckily, there are no squads on the lookout. There is no conspiracy against us, unless it is a conspiracy of indifference. But there are more powerful things in the modern world (and people who are the slaves of things, and people who are things) that move against poetry like an intractable enemy, all the more horrible because unconscious. They would kill the poet—that is, make him stop writing poetry. We must stay alive, must write then, write as excellently as we can. And if out of our labors and agonies there appears, along with our more moderate triumphs, even one speck of the final distillate, the eternal stuff pure and radiant as a drop of uranium, we are justified. For history, which does not lie, has proven that our product, if understood and used as it ought to be, is more powerful for the conservation of man than any mere material metal can be for his destruction.
HYAM PLUTZIK
writing for the Rochester
Poetry Society, October 1950
APPLES FROM SHINAR
BECAUSE THE RED OSIER DOGWOOD
Because the red osier dogwood
Is the winter lightning,
The retention of the prime fire
In the naked and forlorn season
When snow is winner
(For he flames quietly above the shivering mouse
In the moldy tunnel,
The eggs of the grasshopper awaiting metamorphosis
Into the lands of hay and the times of the daisy,
The snake contorted in the gravel,
His brain suspended in thought
Over an abyss that summer will fill with murmuring
And frogs make laughable: the cricket-haunted time)—
I, seeing in the still red branches
The stubborn, unflinching fire of that time,
Will not believe the horror at the door, the snow-white worm
Gnawing at the edges of the mind,
The hissing tree when the sleet falls.
For because the red osier dogwood
Is the winter sentinel,
I am certain of the return of the moth
(Who was not destroyed when an August flame licked him),
And the cabbage butterfly, and all the families
Whom the sun fathers, in the cauldron of his mercy.
THE DREAM ABOUT OUR MASTER, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
This midnight dream whispered to me:
Be swift as a runner, take the lane
Into the green mystery
Beyond the farm and haystack at Stone.
You leave tomorrow, not to return.
Hands that were fastened in a vise,
A useless body, rooted feet,
While time like a bell thundered the loss,
Witnessed the closing of the gate.
Thus sleep and waking both betrayed.
I had one glimpse: In a close of shadow
There rose the form of a manor-house,
And in a corner a curtained window.
All was lost in a well of trees,
Yet I knew for certain this was the place.
If the hound of air, the ropes of shade,
And the gate between that is no gate,
Had not so held me and delayed
These cowardly limbs of bone and blood,
I would have met him as he lived!
TO MY DAUGHTER
Seventy-seven betrayers will stand by the road,
And those who love you will be few but stronger.
Seventy-seven betrayers, skilful and various,
But do not fear them: they are unimportant.
You must learn soon, soon, that despite Judas
The great betrayals are impersonal
(Though many would be Judas, having the will
And the capacity, but few the courage).
You must learn soon, soon, that even love
Can be no shield against the abstract demons:
Time, cold and fire, and the law of pain,
The law of things falling, and the law of forgetting.
The messengers, of faces and names known
Or of forms familiar, are innocent.
I AM DISQUIETED WHEN I SEE MANY HILLS
I am disquieted when I see many hills,
As one who looks down on the backs of tremendous cattle,
Shoulder to shoulder, munching in silence the grass
In a timeless region.
Where time is not, event and breath are nothing,
Yet we who are lost in time,
