Nancy Cunard, British writer, heiress and political activist, born 1896.
ALLEGORY
Nancy Cunard
Hear your three symbols of today:
The lamb, the crow, the eagle live,
The crow would bear the lamb away
Fierce-taloned to a falconry:
Gaunt as the eagle would he strive.
The lamb, the crow, the eagle brood
On temporal sorrows; peregrine
Falls to the snare, and I have seen
Raven lamenting in a wood,
And the lone lamb upon the green.
The lamb, the crow, the eagle die;
The lamb must bleed in merciless hands,
The crow decays on shipwrecked sands,
The eagle exiled from his sky –
So did my only eagle die.
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AMARANTH OF SUNSET
Done, undone, not done, and done too well –
Oh Chile of my despair, oh orb of thieves,
Oh whirlpool madness – oh you curious hell
Of love and hate, you cradle of all that grieves.
All Shakespeare vested in one small drunk man,
All of the poets in this love of mine,
All of the sorrows on that raft of wine;
Was this the man for me, the final man,
Who knows? Gone – to the amaranthyn last
Shaft as he watched it muttering “Never more…”
I see my poet walking by the shore
Of time alone as I, locked in our past, Snarling, quiescent.
And then up speaks the wine:
“You to your life, mijito; I, to mine.”
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THE LANDS THAT WERE TODAY
Nancy Cunard
(To Kay Boyle)
Ah listen, mark – the Devil’s sick again.
It is night; it is Radio; it is the Danzig brew;
Noise of rushing rabble, shingle by arrogant sea,
Hush, hush, the demagogue’s rampant.
How interesting, hideous but interesting, the noise of it all,
The key-drop, the holy tear in the voice between hiccups to Mars,
The down-slide, the mad uprush.. “Humanität”.. the orchestration.
It’s lasted.. “Begeisterung am Menschen”.. already one hour –
Here in Normandy
The stooks are set, the men gone in their millions to the East.
“Sie wissen hier genau” – oh voice of Devil-never-Fausted-with-doubt –
We do, genau we do – the land that was Heine and Goethe.
Do not cutt off the man’s voice, pray, with your sticks to the fire,
Plague on your cooking-clatter; listen: a dictator bursts.
I am thinking: “After the countries, he killed himself; yes, he could try that,
But that is not enough; nothing can be enough.” …
The land that was…Today “finalism” without meaning.
On the wings of wine I am thinking, thinking, thinking,
Past-present-future, of something that will not go into words.
Tears have told it, tears buried with blood in revenge pendent in Italy,
Something…how does it go … something like a quotation:
“How long, how long,
Dictator’s stamping-ground the people’s breast?”
What do we know of war? We know there is some kind of war,
Cynical, covert, cold, censored, a wraith-war, leashed holocausts,
There in men’s East – but here, later, with lilacs, acacias,
laited round batteries, snapped – bleeding spring over corpses, over one I knew?
My village, my lovely land, my bit of eternal France…..
Listen, tune in again, for the set is ending:
“Three years, says Britain. I, Hitler, answer, seven!
Siegheil!” (Oh their raucous hall and their gruff teutonic band)
And that is that,
and …
And then the Gallic cock lifted his spur
And the old lion woke out of his cynic rheums
And shook his claws, brushed fur and came alive again.
And all the tense driven pageantry of Empire got under way,
And we are forty now that knew the day
They killed Edward, Patrick, Ramond, Ivo, and my lover
In such fields’ corners that are less England ever than is a stoop of mull by September stove –
Ay, it begins again, but it is different, for there are wars, and more, between;
And I have seen, I have seen,
Lived part of one, and shall again, I know;
And been Where truth haunts rock and stone immortally round a people strong in the thigh;
I have seen them fight, and the fear of their truth used as order that they should die.
And now, dead men of England, lend me your ears
By the autumn stove, and from your timeless close,
Your chartless regions and unknowable spheres,
Communicate, pass by, or whisper what no man knows:
Is Humanity inching along? Is it ‘Now”, is it “Not in our time”?
We are at one on it all – we are at one I suppose…
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LOVE’S ALBA AGAINST TIME, TIME’S AGAINST LOVE
Nancy Cunard
Time counts the lovers’ strokes,
Each, stringing his knots along endeavour.
Devil – what have I to say to thee?
Wij beminnen elkander…
we love, love, we love on, in dutch, so.
Who says unsays much later;
Who all unsays has all said once.
O n c e ? Is that treachery or is it time?
De fil en aiguille, au fil de l’heure…
Filles et fils de l’heure, écoutez:
“Il y eut une fois”…
Ay, that’s my enemy, “Once a time”, “ago”,
And as Aragon has it “Aima, ai-ma” –
You need no other histories.
So in the blue room
What’s mine’s yours, ours, in fief holden
For that himself Time is;
So it’s not “you and I”, it’s Time’s sport…
Time’s foe, my friend, Gin, the white king –
In his ermines lives possibility,
His card-houses are my Spanish castles
To which the thread of Ariadne is
What will have been.
Time like a Mexican, a mask on a desert;
The desert full of sacrificial round-stones well-blooded,
Not seen, sensed only, tenants of the long unfinished poem –
Better a stroph or two in honour of the white king:
Oh gin, white king… oh what a lordly lover..
Making much of nothing…wrap oh wrap me into your ermines…..
And here’s your shaving-water and your shoe-trees,
Braces and pommatum and your watch and key chains,
Also nine o’clock, sir, all safe sir –
but not your lover, sir –
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MEDITERRANEAN – FROM THE VAR
Nancy Cunard
1
Red earth, pale olive, fragmentary vine
Mellow with sun’s decline.
In aftermath of harvest all the days
Are flushed with stillness, lit with almond greys,
And this November afternoon I see
Cypress against the sky so very still.
Upon a narrow strand
Full surges moving to the barren land
Towered with rocks, and on this sudden hill
I pause before the sunset that shall be
In its last hour a psalm
Sped to the journeying heart that seeketh balm.
2
Pale moon, slip of malachite
Above the smoke of the clouds poising
In a green moment that will not last –
And you there, far beyond the furthest roads and sea-paths,
Distiller of the heavens,
One drop of blood in the sky suffusing it:
Sunset, advancing
From this grey weather suddenly.