Feats of Courage,

FEATS OF COURAGE


Feats of courage and the heroic death
For the cause country or the desert zones
Peeping voices low under old stony buildings
In wake of the retreating armies of the Rhone.

On the hill an impregnable fortress
On the ground a mound of hay and mud
The battering of bats against the windows
In ruins destroyed by the war of mammon.

Give us a change of seasons
A little pause of breath after the sunrise
Two and two along bundled hay stacks
An undamaged barn along the ground.

Looking across the high window there is
A landscape stretching across the fields
But the internal bonds of prison keep tying
The gaze inwards towards the shields
Facing the demigods of death and destruction
Muzzled up rifles wolf dogs punitive camps
In the verse a demolition a smouldering ash
To counteract the poisons of the times.