One of the greatest war poems of all time

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  • November 6, 2017 at 7:31 pm #77026
    zn
    Moderator

    First, some background, lifted straight from the wiki. Zbigniew Herbert (29 October 1924 – 28 July 1998) was a Polish poet and a member of the Polish resistance movement during WW2 and the German occupation.

    The Rain

    BY ZBIGNIEW HERBERT

    When my older brother
    came back from war
    he had on his forehead a little silver star
    and under the star
    an abyss

    a splinter of shrapnel
    hit him at Verdun
    or perhaps at Grünwald
    (he’d forgotten the details)

    he used to talk much
    in many languages
    but he liked most of all
    the language of history

    until losing breath
    he commanded his dead pals to run
    Roland Kowaski Hannibal

    he shouted
    that this was the last crusade
    that Carthage soon would fall
    and then sobbing confessed
    that Napoleon did not like him

    we looked at him
    getting paler and paler
    abandoned by his senses
    he turned slowly into a monument

    into musical shells of ears
    entered a stone forest
    and the skin of his face
    was secured
    with the blind dry
    buttons of eyes

    nothing was left him
    but touch

    what stories
    he told with his hands
    in the right he had romances
    in the left soldier’s memories

    they took my brother
    and carried him out of town
    he returns every fall
    slim and very quiet
    he does not want to come in
    he knocks at the window for me

    we walk together in the streets
    and he recites to me
    improbable tales
    touching my face
    with blind fingers of rain

    …

    “The Rain” by Zbigniew Herbert from Selected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert, Edited and Translated by Czeslaw Milosz

    November 6, 2017 at 9:59 pm #77039
    wv
    Participant

    Good stuff.

    w
    v

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