Still Falls the Rain

(The Raids, 1940. Night and Dawn)

Still falls the Rain –
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss –
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat
In the Potters’ Field, and the sound of the impious feet

On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us –
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.

Still falls the Rain –
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man’s wounded Side
He bears in his Heart all wounds, – those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear, –
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh ... the tears of the hunted hare.

Still falls the Rain –
Then – O I'll leape up to my God: who pulles me doune –
See, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree
Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world, – dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar’s laurel crown.

Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain –
“Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee.”


~ Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) English poet


From my friend Caroline Carson, some explanation:

Sitwell compares the Nazi bombing of London to the Crucifixion. As befits the historical context, this is a bleak poem about the sinfulness of humanity. Each year since Christ’s birth become another nail that humanity has driven into his body on the cross (“nineteen hundred and forty nails”), and the poem alludes to famous betrayers, murderers, and sinners from the Bible and literature. But there is a turn in the final stanza, as Jesus continues to shed his blood willingly for sinful humanity. (Composer Benjamin Britten wrote a musical setting for this poem in 1955.)
~ Potter’s Field” – a burial ground for poor and unknown people. From Matthew, in which Judas’s thirty pieces of silver for betraying Jesus are used to buy a potter’s field for burying foreigners (Matthew 27:7-8).
--“Field of Blood” – the name given to the potter’s field in Matthew 27:7-8, because it is bought with Judas’s “blood money.”
--“Cain” – the Bible’s first murderer, who kills his brother Abel (Genesis 4).
--“Dives and Lazarus” – the rich man and the poor man in Jesus’s parable about judgment and the afterlife. Dives (Latin for “rich man”) ignores the suffering of Lazarus, a beggar at his gate; when both men die, Lazarus ascends to heaven while Dives is sent to hell (Luke 16:19-31). In the poem’s next line, “the sore” refers to Lazarus, who was afflicted with terrible sores while on earth, and “the gold” refers to Dives.

And in the next to last stanza there is a reference to Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe:
FAUSTUS: Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn’d perpetually!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d.
O, I’ll leap up to my God! – Who pulls me down? –
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ! –
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!

Benjamin Britten's setting of the poem from 1955:

V: The Soldier, from The War Sonnets

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.


-- Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) English poet and sailor who died of sepsis in 1915 on his way to Gallipoli and is buried in Greece; his lone brother was killed in action in 1917 after 19 days on the Western Front.

Against War

And as we — by our prayers —
vanquish all the demons that stir up war,
and lead to the violation of oaths,
and disturb the peace,
we in this service
are much more helpful to the kings
than those who go into the field
to fight for them.

And we do take our part in public affairs,
when along with righteous prayers,
we practice self-denying disciplines and meditations,
which teach us to despise pleasures,
and not to be lead astray by them.
And none fight better for the king
[and his role of preserving justice]
than we do.
We do not indeed fight under him,
although he demands it;
but we fight on his behalf,
forming a special army of piety
by offering our prayers to God.

--Origen (185–254 AD), Church Father and Theologian, from Against Celsus, Book VIII, Chapter 73, written in verse in Water, Faith and Wood: Stories of the Early Church’s Witness for Today, by Christopher Smith

Exiles

1

Only they had escaped
to tell us how
the house had gone
and things had vanished,
how they lay in their beds
and were wakened by the wind
and saw the roof gone
and thought they were dreaming.
But the starry night
and the chill they felt were real.
And they looked around
and saw trees instead of walls.
When the sun rose
they saw nothing of their own.
Other houses were collapsing.
Other trees were falling.
They ran for the train
but the train had gone.
They ran to the river
but there were no boats.
They thought about us.
They would come here.
So they got to their feet
and started to run.
There were no birds.
The wind had died.
Their clothes were tattered
and fell to the ground.
So they ran
and covered themselves
with their hands
and shut their eyes
and imagined us
taking them in.
They could not hear
the sound of their footsteps.
They felt they were drifting.
All day they had run
and now could see nothing,
not even their hands.
Everything faded
around their voices
until only their voices were left,
telling the story.
And after the story,
their voices were gone.

2

They were not gone
and the story they told
was barely begun,
for when the air was silent
and everything faded
it only meant that these
exiles came
into a country
not their own,
into a radiance
without hope.
Having come too far,
they were frightened back
into the night of their origin.
And on the way back
they heard the footsteps
and felt the warmth
of the clothes they thought
had been lifted from them.
They ran by the boats at anchor,
hulking in the bay,
by the train waiting
under the melting frost of stars.
Their sighs were mixed
with the sighs of the wind.
And when the moon rose,
they were still going back.
And when the trees
and houses reappeared,
they saw what they wanted:
the return of their story
to where it began.
They saw it in the cold
room under the roof
chilled by moonlight.
They lay in their beds
and the shadows of the giant trees
brushed darkly against the walls.

--Mark Strand (1934-2014), American poet and US poet laureate, from The Late Hour, 1978.

Photos: Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion, March, 2022; and migrants crossing the southern border of the US, 2021.

The Lonely Eagles

for Daniel “Chappie” James, General USAF
and for the 332d Fighter Group

Being black in America

was the Original Catch,

so no one was surprised

by 22:

The segregated airstrips,

separate camps.

They did the jobs

they’d been trained to do.

 

Black ground crews kept them in the air;

black flight surgeons kept them alive;

the whole Group removed their headgear

when another pilot died.

 

They were known by their names:

“Ace” and “Lucky,”

“Sky-hawk Johnny,” “Mr. Death.”

And by their positions and planes.

Red Leader to Yellow Wing-man,

do you copy?

 

If you could find a fresh egg

you bought it and hid it

in your dopp-kit or your boot

until you could eat it alone.

On the night before a mission

you gave a buddy

your hiding-places

as solemnly

as a man dictating

his will.

There’s a chocolate bar

in my Bible;

my whiskey bottle

is inside my bedroll.

 

In beat-up Flying Tigers

that had seen action in Burma,

they shot down three German jets.

They were the only outfit

in the American Air Corps

to sink a destroyer

with fighter planes.

Fighter planes with names

like “By Request.”

Sometimes the radios

didn’t even work.

 

They called themselves

“Hell from Heaven.”

This Spookwaffe.

My father’s old friends.

 

It was always

maximum effort:

A whole squadron

of brother-men

raced across the tarmac

and mounted their planes.

 

            My tent-mate was a guy named Starks.

            The funny thing about me and Starks

            was that my air mattress leaked,

            and Starks’ didn’t.

            Every time we went up,

            I gave my mattress to Starks

            and put his on my cot.

 

            One day we were strafing a train.

            Strafing’s bad news:

            you have to fly so low and slow

            you’re a pretty clear target.

            My other wing-man and I

            exhausted our ammunition and got out.

            I recognized Starks

            by his red tail

            and his rudder’s trim-tabs.

            He couldn’t pull up his nose.

            He dived into the train

            and bought the farm.

 

            I found his chocolate,

            three eggs, and a full fifth

            of his hoarded-up whiskey.

            I used his mattress

            for the rest of my tour.

 

            It still bothers me, sometimes:

            I was sleeping

            on his breath.

-- Marilyn Nelson (1946- ), African American poet, translator, children’s book author, three-time finalist for the National Book Award, and former poet laureate of Connecticut

The Owl

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;
Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest
Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken our long and clear upon the hill,
No merry note, nor cute of merriment,
But one telling me what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.


--Edward Thomas (1878-1917), English biographer, critic, poet and soldier, killed in the Battle of Arras, Easter Monday, 1917.

I Find No Peace

I find no peace, and all my war is done.
I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice.
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;
And nought I have, and all the world I seize on.
That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison
And holdeth me not—yet can I scape no wise—
Nor letteth me live nor die at my device,
And yet of death it giveth me occasion.
Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain.
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health.
I love another, and thus I hate myself.
I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain;
Likewise displeaseth me both life and death,
And my delight is causer of this strife.

-- Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), pioneering Elizabethan poet

Photo from Al-Jazeera of residents of Afghanistan fleeing before the Taliban onslaught upon the US withdrawal, August, 2021

Waking Early Sunday Morning

O to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall –
raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten
steps of the roaring ladder, and then
to clear the top on the last try,
alive enough to spawn and die.

Stop, back off. The salmon breaks
water, and now my body wakes
to feel the unpolluted joy
and criminal leisure of a boy –
no rainbow smashing a dry fly
in the white run is free as I,
here squatting like a dragon on
time's hoard before the day's begun!

Fierce, fireless mind, running downhill.
Look up and see the harbor fill:
business as usual in eclipse
goes down to the sea in ships –
wake of refuse, dacron rope,
bound for Bermuda or Good Hope,
all bright before the morning watch
the wine-dark hulls of yawl and ketch.

I watch a glass of water wet
with a fine fuzz of icy sweat,
silvery colors touched with sky,
serene in their neutrality –
yet if I shift, or change my mood,
I see some object made of wood,
background behind it of brown grain,
to darken it, but not to stain.

O that the spirit could remain
tinged but untarnished by its strain!
Better dressed and stacking birch,
or lost with the Faithful at Church –
anywhere, but somewhere else!
And now the new electric bells,
clearly chiming, "Faith of our fathers,"
and now the congregation gathers.

O Bible chopped and crucified
in hymns we hear but do not read,
none of the milder subtleties
of grace or art will sweeten these
stiff quatrains shoveled out four-square –
they sing of peace, and preach despair;
yet they gave darkness some control,
and left a loophole for the soul.

When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag-
pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad.

Hammering military splendor,
top-heavy Goliath in full armor –
little redemption in the mass
liquidations of their brass,
elephant and phalanx moving
with the times and still improving,
when that kingdom hit the crash:
a million foreskins stacked like trash ...

Sing softer! But what if a new
diminuendo brings no true
tenderness, only restlessness,
excess, the hunger for success,
sanity or self-deception
fixed and kicked by reckless caution,
while we listen to the bells –
anywhere, but somewhere else!

O to break loose. All life's grandeur
is something with a girl in summer ...
elated as the President
girdled by his establishment
this Sunday morning, free to chaff
his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff,
swimming nude, unbuttoned, sick
of his ghost-written rhetoric!

No weekends for the gods now. Wars
flicker, earth licks its open sores,
fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
assassinations, no advance.
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life ...

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war – until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.

--Robert Lowell (1917-1977) American poet

Beyond the Headlines

Then I saw the wild geese flying
in fair formation to their bases in Inchicore
and I knew that these wings would outwear the wings of war
and a man's simple thoughts outlive the day's loud lying.
Don't fear, don't fear, I said to my soul.
The bedlam of time is an empty bucket rattled,
‘Tis you who will say in the end who best battles.
only they who fly home to God have flown at all. 

--Patrick Kavanagh (1905-1967), Irish poet, written in Dublin in 1943, from Collected Poems, 1964

Image: Pale Bellied Brent Geese migrate back to Dublin Bay (Inchicore is a suburb of Dublin)

Home

no one leaves home unless

home is the mouth of a shark

you only run for the border

when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbours running faster than you

breath bloody in their throats

the boy you went to school with

who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory

is holding a gun bigger than his body

you only leave home

when home won't let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you

fire under feet

hot blood in your belly

it's not something you ever thought of doing

until the blade burnt threats into

your neck

and even then you carried the anthem under

your breath

only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets

sobbing as each mouthful of paper

made it clear that you wouldn't be going back.

you have to understand,

that no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land

no one burns their palms

under trains

beneath carriages

no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck

feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled

means something more than journey.

no one crawls under fences

no one wants to be beaten

pitied

no one chooses refugee camps

or strip searches where your

body is left aching

or prison,

because prison is safer

than a city of fire

and one prison guard

in the night

is better than a truckload

of men who look like your father

no one could take it

no one could stomach it

no one skin would be tough enough

the

go home blacks

refugees

dirty immigrants

asylum seekers sucking our country dry

niggers with their hands out

they smell strange

savage

messed up their country and now they want

to mess ours up

how do the words

the dirty looks

roll off your backs

maybe because the blow is softer

than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender

than fourteen men between

your legs

or the insults are easier

to swallow

than rubble

than bone

than your child body

in pieces.

i want to go home,

but home is the mouth of a shark

home is the barrel of the gun

and no one would leave home unless home

chased you to the shore

unless home told you

to quicken your legs

leave your clothes behind

crawl through the desert

wade through the oceans

drown 

save

be hunger

beg

forget pride

your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear

saying-

leave,

run away from me now

i dont know what i've become

but i know that anywhere

is safer than here.

--Warsan Shire (1988- ), Somali-British poet, musician, and artist

Image: Flight, an installation by war artist Arabella Dorman in St. James's Church, Picadilly, London, from December 20, 2015-February 8, 2016. The dinghy was recovered from the island of Lesbos.

According to Victoria Emily Jones at her Art & Theology blog, "The rubber sea vessel Dorman used in the installation was designed to carry fifteen people but ended up carrying sixty-two. (Such overcrowding on refugee-filled boats is the norm.) While en route, it began taking on water, and its passengers had to be rescued by the Greek coast guard. Luckily, everyone survived. Passengers on other overtaxed vessels between Turkey and Greece have not been so lucky."

For the Union Dead

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, 
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die—
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flag
 quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year—
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

-- Robert Lowell (1917-1977), from Collected Poems, 2003.



Image: Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, By Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1888.

The Cathedral of Rheims

(From the French of Emile Verhaeren)

He who walks through the meadows of Champagne
At noon in Fall, when leaves like gold appear,
Sees it draw near
Like some great mountain set upon the plain,
From radiant dawn until the close of day,
Nearer it grows
To him who goes
Across the country. When tall towers lay
Their shadowy pall
Upon his way,
He enters, where
The solid stone is hollowed deep by all
Its centuries of beauty and of prayer. 
Ancient French temple! thou whose hundred kings
Watch over thee, emblazoned on thy walls,
Tell me, within thy memory-hallowed halls
What chant of triumph, or what war-song rings?
Thou hast known Clovis and his Frankish train,
Whose mighty hand Saint Remy's hand did keep
And in thy spacious vault perhaps may sleep
An echo of the voice of Charlemagne.
For God thou has known fear, when from His side
Men wandered, seeking alien shrines and new,
But still the sky was bountiful and blue
And thou wast crowned with France's love and pride.
Sacred thou art, from pinnacle to base;
And in thy panes of gold and scarlet glass
The setting sun sees thousandfold his face;
Sorrow and joy, in stately silence pass
Across thy walls, the shadow and the light;
Around thy lofty pillars, tapers white
Illuminate, with delicate sharp flames,
The brows of saints with venerable names,
And in the night erect a fiery wall.
A great but silent fervour burns in all
Those simple folk who kneel, pathetic, dumb,
And know that down below, beside the Rhine --
Cannon, horses, soldiers, flags in line --
With blare of trumpets, mighty armies come.

Suddenly, each knows fear;
Swift rumours pass, that every one must hear,
The hostile banners blaze against the sky
And by the embassies mobs rage and cry.
Now war has come, and peace is at an end.
On Paris town the German troops descend.
They are turned back, and driven to Champagne.
And now, as to so many weary men,
The glorious temple gives them welcome, when
It meets them at the bottom of the plain.
At once, they set their cannon in its way.
There is no gable now, nor wall
That does not suffer, night and day,
As shot and shell in crushing torrents fall.
The stricken tocsin quivers through the tower;
The triple nave, the apse, the lonely choir
Are circled, hour by hour,
With thundering bands of fire
And Death is scattered broadcast among men.
And then
That which was splendid with baptismal grace;
The stately arches soaring into space,
The transepts, columns, windows gray and gold,
The organ, in whose tones the ocean rolled,
The crypts, of mighty shades the dwelling places,
The Virgin's gentle hands, the Saints' pure faces,
All, even the pardoning hands of Christ the Lord
Were struck and broken by the wanton sword
Of sacrilegious lust.
O beauty slain, O glory in the dust!
Strong walls of faith, most basely overthrown!
The crawling flames, like adders glistening
Ate the white fabric of this lovely thing.
Now from its soul arose a piteous moan,
The soul that always loved the just and fair.
Granite and marble loud their woe confessed,
The silver monstrances that Popes had blessed,
The chalices and lamps and crosiers rare
Were seared and twisted by a flaming breath;
The horror everywhere did range and swell,
The guardian Saints into this furnace fell,
Their bitter tears and screams were stilled in death.
Around the flames armed hosts are skirmishing,
The burning sun reflects the lurid scene;
The German army, fighting for its life,
Rallies its torn and terrified left wing;
And, as they near this place
The imperial eagles see
Before them in their flight,
Here, in the solemn night,
The old cathedral, to the years to be
Showing, with wounded arms, their own disgrace.

--Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918), American Roman Catholic writer and poet, who was killed by a sniper at the Battle of Ourcq in northern France on July 30, 1918.

Illustrations:
1) The restored Cathedral de Notre Dame de Reims now hosts a light show on its exterior during the summer (May-Sept) depicting what it may have looked like when it was painted.
2) The Cathedral was targeted several times by artillery during World War I, destroying its roof and burning its wooden interior.
3) The 13th century Rose Window, depicting the creation and fall, was one of the few things in the priginalc Cathedral to survive the wars that have damaged the building.

In Flanders Fields

This installation contains one ceramic poppy for every soldier from the UK or the Commonwealth who was killed in World War 1 and was completed for Remembrance Day in 2014.
The artist is the second from the right. The story can be found here.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

--John McCrae (1872-1918), Canadian physician, poet, and soldier, from In Flanders Fields and Other Poems, 1919 (published posthumously)

Installation of Poppies from the World War 1 Museum, Kansas City