Читать книгу The Cruel Solstice - Sidney Keyes - Страница 5

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Look, Aimée, and you, Victor, look—

The birds have taken all our cherries—

Down in the brown-walled orchard on the hillside

The cherry-trees are weeping for their fruit;

Only the clusters of green stalks

Remain; the stones are scattered on the grass.

There will be no more cherries, not this summer

Nor next, if we get another. God!

It’s beyond bearing that they eat our cherries

And fly away and leave the trees in mourning.

Soon an invader will be taking more than cherries:

They’ll be stealing our dreams or breaking up

Our history for firewood.

Our history for firewood.Children, see

The avenues of cherry-trees are broken

And trampled boughs crawl in the dust. See, Victor,

How the sun bouncing off the mountain strikes

Christ’s wooden throat above the cemetery:

Flesh broken like our cherry-trees and ravished.

The path runs open and smiling down the hill;

It leaps the walls and hides behind the ruins.

Now take this moment and create its image

Impregnable to time or trespasser,

And turn your mind to realise your loss.

The cherry-trees are broken and their fruit

Sown on the indecipherable mountains.

Realise your loss and take it in your hands

And turn it like a pebble. You perceive

It has a stone’s dumb smell; its patterns

Plot some forgotten map. Regard your loss.

Planting this lump of pain, perhaps a flower

Might burst from it; perhaps a cherry-tree,

Perhaps a world or a new race of men.

Regard your loss. The blossoms of the cherry

Are rotten now; the branch is violated;

The fruit is stolen and our dreams have failed.

Yet somewhere—O beyond what bitter ranges?—

A seed drops from the sky and like a bomb

Explodes into our orchard’s progeny,

And so our care may colonise a desert.

They cannot break our trees or waste our dreams,

For their despoiling is a kind of sowing.

Aimée and Victor, stop crying. Can’t you understand

They cannot steal our cherries or our joy?

Let them take what they want, even our dreams.

Somewhere our loss will plant a better orchard.