Authors: Ted Hughes
The sea grieves all night long.
The wall is past groaning.
The field has given up –
It can’t care any more.
Even the tree
Waits like an old man
Who has seen his whole family murdered.
Horrible world
Where I let in again –
As if for the first time –
The untouched joy.
Hearing your moan echo, I chill. I shiver.
I know
You can’t stay with those trees.
I know
The river is only fabled to be orphan.
I know
The flowers also look for you, and die looking.
Just as the sun returns every day
As if owned.
Like me
These are neither your brides, nor your grooms.
Each of us is nothing
But the fleeting warm pressure
Of your footfall
As you pace
Your cage of freedom.
Faces lift out of the earth
Moistly-lidded, and gazing unfocussed
Like babies new born.
And with cries like the half-cry
Of a near-fatally wounded person
Not yet fallen, but already unconscious.
And these are the ones
Who are trying to tell
Your name.
From age to age
Nothing bequeathed
But a gagged yell
A clutchful of sod
And libraries
Of convalescence.
I skin the skin
Take the eye from the eye
Extract the entrails from the entrails
I scrape the flesh from the flesh
Pluck the heart
From the heart
Drain away the blood from the blood
Boil the bones till nothing is left
But the bones
I pour away the sludge of brains
Leaving simply the brains
Soak it all
In the crushed-out oil of the life
Eat
Eat
What steel was it the river poured
Horizontally
Into the sky’s evening throat –
Put out the sun.
The steel man, in his fluttering purples,
Is lifted from the mould’s fragments.
I breathe on him
Terrors race over his skin.
He almost lives
Who dare meet you.
Calves harshly parted from their mamas
Stumble through all the hedges in the country
Hither thither crying day and night
Till their throats will only grunt and whistle.
After some days, a stupor sadness
Collects them again in their field.
They will never stray any more.
From now on, they only want each other.
So much for calves.
As for the tiger
He lies still
Like left luggage.
He is roaming the earth light, unseen.
He is safe.
Heaven and hell have both adopted him.
A bang – a burning –
I opened my eyes
In a vale crumbling with echoes.
A solitary dove
Cries in the tree – I cannot bear it.
From this centre
It wearies the compass.
Am I killed?
Or am I searching?
Is this the rainbow silking my body?
Which wings are these?
The dead man lies, marching here and there
In the battle for life, without moving.
He prays he will escape for what comes after.
At least that he’ll escape. So he lies still.
But it arrives
Invisible as a bullet
And the dead man flings up his arms
With a cry
Incomprehensible in every language
And from that moment
He never stops trying to dance, trying to sing
And maybe he dances and sings
Because you kissed him.
If you miss him, he stays dead
Among the inescapable facts.
Every day the world gets simply
Bigger and bigger
And smaller and smaller
Every day the world gets more
And more beautiful
And uglier and uglier.
Your comings get closer.
Your goings get worse.