The Horses
Barely a twelvemonth after / The seven days´ war that put the world to sleep, / Late in the evening the strange horses came. / By then we had made our covenant with silence, / But in the first few days it was so still / We listened to our breathing and were afraid. / On the second day / The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer. / On the third day a warship passed us, heading north, / Dead bodies piled on the deck. / On the sixth day / A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter / Nothing. The radios dumb; / And still they stand in corners of our kitchens, / And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a millon rooms / All over the world. But now if they should speak, / If on a sudden they should speak again, / If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak, / We would not listen, we would not let it bring / That old bad world that swallowed its children quick / At one great gulp. We would not have it again. / Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep, / Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow, / And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness. /The tractors lie about our fields; at evening / They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting. / We leave them were they are and let them rust: / “They ´ll moulder away and be like other loam”. / We make our oxen drag our rusty ploughs, / Long laid aside. We have gone back / Far past our fathers’land. / And then, that evening / Late in the summer the strange horses came. / We heard a distant tapping on the road,/ A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again / And at the corner changed to hollow thunder. / We saw the heads / Like a wild wave charging and were afraid. / We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time / To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us / As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield / Or illustrations in a book of knights. / We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited, / Stubborn and shy, as if they have been sent / By and old command to find our whereabouts / And that long-lost archaic companionship. / In the first moment we had never a thought / That they were creatures to be owned and used. / Among them were some half-a-dozen colts / Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world, / Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden. / Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads, / But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts. / Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.