Read Online Collected Poems 1931-74 by Lawrence Durrell - Free Book Online Page B

funny Greek.
    We will never record it: the black
    Choirs of water flowing on moss,
    The black sun’s kisses opening,
    Upon their blindness, like two eyes
    Enormous, open in bed against one’s own.
    Something sang in the firmament.
    The past, my friend compelled you,
    The charge of habit and love.
    The olive in the blood awoke,
    The stones of Athens in their pride
    Will remember, regret and often bless.
    Kisses in letters from home:
    Crosses in the snow: now surely
    Lover and loved exist again
    By a strange communion of darkness.
    Those who went in all innocence,
    Whom the wheel disfigured: whom
    Charity will not revisit or repair,
    The innocent who fell like apples.
    Consider how love betrays us:
    In the conversation of the prophets
    Who daily repaired the world
    By profit and loss, with no text
    On the unknown quantity
    By whose possession all problems
    Are only ink and air made words:
    I mean friends everywhere who smile
    And reach out their hands.
    Anger inherits where love
    Betrays: iron only can clean:
    And praises only crucify the loved
    In their matchless errand, death.
    Remember the earth will roll
    Down her old grooves and spring
    Utter swallows again, utter swallows.
    Others will inherit the sea-shell,
    Murmuring to the foolish its omens,
    Uncurving on the drum of the ear,
    The vowels of an ocean beyond us,
    The history, the inventions of the sea:
    Upon all parallels of the salt wave,
    To lovers lying like sculptures
    In islands of smoke and marble,
    Will enter the reflections of poets
    By the green wave, the chemical water.
    I have no fear for the land
    Of the dark heads with aimed noses,
    The hair of night and the voices
    Which mimic a traditional laughter:
    Nor for a new language where
    A mole upon a dark throat
    Of a girl is called ‘an olive’:
    All these things are simply Greece.
    Her blue boundaries are
    Upon a curving sky of time,
    In a dark menstruum of water:
    The names of islands like doors
    Open upon it: the rotting walls
    Of the European myth are here
    For us, the industrious singers,
    In the service of this blue, this enormous blue.
    Soon it will be spring. Out of
    This huge magazine of flowers, the earth,
    We will enchant the house with roses,
    The girls with flowers in their teeth,
    The olives full of charm: and all of it
    Given: can one say that
    Any response is enough for those
    Who have a woman, an island and a tree?
    I only know that this time
    More than ever, we must bless
    And pity the darling dead: the women
    Winding up their hair into sea-shells,
    The faces of meek men like dials,
    The great overture of the dead playing,
    Calling all lovers everywhere in all stations
    Who lie on the circumference of ungiven kisses.
    Exhausted rivers ending in the sand;
    Windmills of the old world winding
    And unwinding in musical valleys your arms.
    The contemptible vessel of the body lies
    Lightly in its muscles like a vine;
    Covered the nerves: and like an oil expressed
    From the black olive between rocks,
    Memory lulls and bathes in its dear reflections.
    Now the blue lantern of the night
    Moves on the dark in its context of stars.
    O my friend, history with all her compromises
    Cannot disturb the circuit made by this,
    Alone in the house, a single candle burning
    Upon a table in the whole of Greece.
    Your letter of the 4th was no surprise.
    So Tonio had gone? He will have need of us.
    The sails are going out over the old world.
    Our happiness, here on a promontory,
    Marked by a star, is small but perfect.
    The calculations of the astronomers, the legends
    The past believed in could not happen here.
    Nothing remains but Joy, the infant Joy
    (So quiet the mountain in its shield of snow,
    So unconcerned the faces of the birds),
    With the unsuspected world somewhere awake,
    Born of this darkness, our imperfect sight,
    The stirring seed of Nostradamus’ rose.
    1943/ 1941

FOR A NURSERY MIRROR
    Image, Image, Image answer
    Whether son or whether daughter,
    The persuader or the dancer:
    A