FEATS   OF   COURAGE

Feats of courage and the heroic death

For the cause country or the desert zones

Peeping voices low under old stony buildings

In wake of the retreating armies of the Rhone.

On the hill an impregnable fortress

On the ground a mound of hay and mud

The battering of bats against the windows

In ruins destroyed by the war of mammon.

Give us a change of seasons

A little pause of breath after the sunrise

Two and two along bundled hay stacks

An undamaged barn along the ground.

Looking across the high window there is

A landscape stretching across the fields

But the internal bonds of prison keep tying

The gaze inwards towards the shields

Facing the demigods of death and destruction

Muzzled up rifles wolf dogs punitive camps

In the verse a demolition a smouldering ash

To counteract the poisons of the times.