how to conduct yourself wearing it

in rooms and streets, in your daily doings.

They gaze as silent baboons

in the guise of long snouts

though under this outer guise they are

human wanderers with nostrils seeking

air, oxygen, freedom, peace.

Under the fantasies of these skulls

runs the hope of human dignity

somehow, sometime.

10

Presents are delivered from the sky,

in every package a prize, a chance,

to choke, to suffocate, to forget

yes to forget every last word ever spoken of

man higher in the scale than animal creation,

the gorilla and the tiger being mere beasts

while man has shrines, altars, lights,

books awarding him personal immortality,

books not yet banned nor burned.

Let yourself be

imperturbable as brass candlesticks

or ancient folios bound in leather

holding common prayers on parchment

with the calm of an ivory crucifix when

shattered glass showers the chairs, the floor, the desk,

splinters and dust of glass cover the bath-tub bottom,

when plaster drops on the breakfast cloth

not long before the walls hesitate and totter

and the roof caves in (as in Hangkow or Canton),

when (as in Madrid) the sirens sound and the ambulances

pick up in the streets the mutilated still breathing

and carry them to hospitals not yet bombed and wrecked.

Few of us will take it

and say it is good

The old wars were

something else again.

Now babies will have baby-size gas masks.

The time to be hard and bitter

—is that time now?

Or shall we insist on asking now the

ancient question:

“What do the people get for the wars

they fight with each other?”

11

The human heart weaves consolations.

And they are made of what?

Of thin air—of the blue substance of the

shadows of bones—

of a stuff so finespun it has the heft of mist, merely mist

or the desperate balance between discipline and

freedom.

Men fight for dreams of freedom

finding later they fought for

land, for trade routes, for empire,

for markets and controls,

for gains in cash and dominance.

Yet again men fight for dreams of freedom

and win footholds for human rights,

measurable gains for mankind:

in the strife of strikes and wars

sometimes this happens

as a poem of action

long remembered.

12

Now in the looking glass of our time

now we have seen rehearsals for what?

The grinning cats of accomplished fact

sit wiping their faces.

Thus it was in Shanghai, in Bilbao, in Ethiopia,

in Vienna on the blue Danube.

The story keeps going:

a serial to be concluded

sometime in the rolling of the ivories,

in the shuffling of cards,

in the heads-or-tails of circumstance,

sometime.

Some had names and numbers.

They are rubbed out.

To them came the bloody trucks

and the published orders

and the secret arrests

and the public atrocities

and the studied punishments

of concentration camps.

Day by day they march—

the living dead men

remembering dimly how

they had freedom:

“and the next day it rained.”