Classic Poem

December, my dear, on the road to Nijmegen,
between the stones and the bitter skies was your face.

At first only the gatherings of graves
along the lank canals, each with a frosted
billy-tin for motto; the bones of tanks
beside the stoven bridges; old men in the mist
knifing chips from a boulevard of stumps;
or women riding into the wind on the rims of their cycles,
like tattered sailboats tossing over the cobbles.

These at first, and the fangs of homes, but more
The clusters of children, like flies, at the back of messhuts,
or groping in gravel for knobs of coal,
their legs standing like dead stems out of their clogs.
Numbed on the long road to mangled Nijmegen,
I thought that only the living of others assures us;
we remember the gentle and true as trees walking,
as the men and women whose breath is a garment about us;
that we who are stretched now in this tomb of time
may remount like Lazarus into the light of kindness
by a hold in the hands of the kind.

And so in the sleet as we neared Nijmegen,
searching my heart for the hope of our minds,
for the proof in the flesh of the words we wish,
for laughter outrising at last the rockets,
I saw the rainbow answer of you,
of you and your seed who, peopling the earth, would distil
our not impossible dreamed horizon,
and who, moving within the nightmare Now,
give us what creed we have for our daily crimes,
for this road that arrives at no future,
for this guilt
in the griefs of the old and the graves of the young.