Collected Earlier Poems by Anthony Hecht Read Free Book Online Page A

the hour of my death.
    It takes more toughness than most have got.
    Or a saintliness.
    Strength of a certain kind, anyway.
    Bald toothless clumsy perhaps
    With all the indignity of old age
    But age is not important.
    There is nothing worth remembering
    But the silver glint in the muck
    The thickening of great trees
    The hard crust getting harder.
“MORE LIGHT! MORE LIGHT!”
    for Heinrich Blücher and Hannah Arendt
    Composed in the Tower before his execution
    These moving verses, and being brought at that time
    Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
    “I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime.”
    Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,
    The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.
    His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap
    Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.
    And that was but one, and by no means one of the worst;
    Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;
    And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,
    That shall judge all men, for his soul’s tranquillity.
    We move now to outside a German wood.
    Three men are there commanded to dig a hole
    In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down
    And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.
    Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill
    Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.
    A Lüger settled back deeply in its glove.
    He was ordered to change places with the Jews.
    Much casual death had drained away their souls.
    The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.
    When only the head was exposed the order came
    To dig him out again and to get back in.
    No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
    When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.
    The Lüger hovered lightly in its glove.
    He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.
    No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
    Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
    Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,
    And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.
“AND CAN YE SING BALULOO WHEN THE BAIRN GREETS?”
    All these years I have known of her despair.
    “I was about to be happy when the abyss
    Opened its mouth. It was empty, except for this
    Yellowish sperm of horror that glistened there.
    I tried so hard not to look as the thing grew fat
    And pulsed in its bed of hair. I tried to think
    Of Sister Marie Gerald, of our swaddled link
    To the Lord of Hosts, the manger, and all of that.
    None of it worked. And even the whip-lash wind,
    To which I clung and begged to be blown away,
    Didn’t work. These eyes, that many have praised as gay,
    Are the stale jellies of lust in which Adam sinned.
    And nothing works. Sickened since God knows when,
    Since early childhood when I first saw the horror,
    I have spent hours alone before my mirror.
    There is no cure for me in the world of men.”
“IT OUT-HERODS HEROD. PRAY YOU, AVOID IT.”
    Tonight my children hunch
    Toward their Western, and are glad
    As, with a Sunday punch,
    The Good casts out the Bad.
    And in their fairy tales
    The warty giant and witch
    Get sealed in doorless jails
    And the match-girl strikes it rich.
    I’ve made myself a drink.
    The giant and witch are set
    To bust out of the clink
    When my children have gone to bed.
    All frequencies are loud
    With signals of despair;
    In flash and morse they crowd
    The rondure of the air.
    For the wicked have grown strong,
    Their numbers mock at death,
    Their cow brings forth its young,
    Their bull engendereth.
    Their very fund of strength,
    Satan, bestrides the globe;
    He stalks its breadth and length
    And finds out even Job.
    Yet by quite other laws
    My children make their case;
    Half God, half Santa Claus,
    But with my voice and face,
    A hero comes to save
    The poorman, beggarman, thief,
    And make the world behave
    And put an end to grief.
    And that their sleep be sound
    I say this childermas
    Who could not, at one time,
    Have saved them from the gas.

  FROM
 A SUMMONING OF STONES
  (1954)
DOUBLE