Читать книгу Cardos y lluvia - Kate Clanchy - Страница 33

I go westwards in the Desert

with my shame on my shoulders,

that I was made a laughing-stock

since I was as my people were.

Love and the greater error,

deceiving honour spoiled me,

with a film of weakness on my vision,

squinting at man’s kind extremity.

From me the Island

when the moon rises on Quattara,

far from the Pine Headland

when the morning ruddiness is on the Desert.

Camus Alba is far from me

and so is the bondage of Europe

far from me in the North-West

the most beautiful grey-blue eyes.

Far from me the Island

and every loved image in Scotland,

there is a foreign sand in History

spoiling the machines of the mind.

Far from me Belsen and Dachau,

Rotterdam, the Clyde and Prague,

and Dimitrov before a court

hitting fear with the thump of hid laugh.

Guernica itself is very far

from the innocent corpses of the Nazis

who are lying in the gravel

and in the kaki sand of the Desert.

There is no rancour in my heart

against the hardy soldiers of the Enemy,

but the kingship that there is among

men in prison on a tidal rock

waiting for the sea flowing

and making cold the warm stone;

and the coldness of life

in the hot sun of the Desert.

But this is the struggle not to be avoided,

the sore extreme of human-kind,

and though I do not hate Rommel’s army

the brain’s eye is not squinting.

And be what was as it was,

I am of the big men of Braes,

of the heroic Raasay MacLeods,

of the sharp-sword Mathesons of Lochalsh;

and the men of my name –who were braver

when their ruinous pride was kindled?