Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  the joy of your hands in a pain that called More Life.

  Let me tell you what I have meant all along:

  meaning of poetry and personal love,

  a world of peace and freedom, man's need recognized,

  and all the agonies that will begin that world.

  Betrayed, we are betrayed. The set of the great faces

  mean it, the following eyes. They are the flayed men,

  their strength is at the center, love and the time's disease

  lie at their skin. The kiss in the flaring garden

  when all the trees closed in. The knotted terrible lips.

  The black blood risen and the animal rage.

  The last fierce accident, whose back-thrown drowning head

  among the escaping sound of water hears

  slow insane music groping for a theme.

  My love, reach me again. The smell of the sea,

  wind-flower, sea-flower, the fallen gull-feather.

  Clear water and order and an end to dreams:

  ether-dreams, surrounded beasts, the aftertoll of fear,

  the world reduced to a rising line of water,

  the patient deserted by the analyst.

  To keep the knowledge that holds my race alive:

  spiritual grace of the material world.

  I walked under the sky, and the high clouds

  hollowed in ribs arched over their living heart:

  the world, the corporeal world that will not die.

  No, world's no heart—here is yourself walking

  in a cage of clouds looking up wanting one face

  over you and that look to fill the sky.

  Carrying counter-agony into the world,

  dream-singing, river-madness, the tragic fugal love

  of a theme balancing another theme.

  Disorder of suffering, a flight of details, a world

  with no shadows at noontime and never at night a light.

  Suddenly the flame-blue of a drunken sky

  and it is the change, the reds and metals of autumn.

  But I curse autumn, for I do not change,

  I love, I love, and we are far from peace,

  and the great river moves unbearably;

  actual gestures of giving, and I may not give.

  Water will hold my shadows, the kiss of darkness,

  maternal death's tender and delicate promises

  seethe at the lips, release and the full sleep.

  Even now the bright corporeal hand

  might come to redeem the long moment of dying.

  Even now if I could rest my life,

  my forehead on those knees and the arriving shadows

  in rising quiet as the long night arrives.

  Terror, war, terror, black blood and wasted love.

  The most terrible country, in the heads of men.

  This is the war imagination made;

  it must be strong enough to make a peace.

  My peace is strong enough if it will come

  flowing, the color of eyes. When the world burns away

  nothing is left can ever be betrayed.

  All broken promises, adulterate release—

  cast in the river Death, charred surface of waste,

  a downward soulset, never the old heaven

  held for a moment as breath held underwater;

  but we must rise into a breathing world.

  And this dark bellowing century, on its knees—?

  If all this must go down, it must.

  And all this brilliance go to dust?

  Only the meanings can remain alive.

  When the cemeteries are military objectives

  and love's a downward drawing at the heart

  and every letter bears the stamp of death.

  There is no solution. There is no happiness.

  Only the range must be taken, a way be found to use

  the inmost frenzy and the outer doom.

  They are here, they run their riot in the clouds,

  fly in our blood and over all our mountains,

  corrupt all waters, poison the pride of theme.

  Years of judgment! Century screaming for

  the flowing, the life, the intellectual leap

  of waters over a world grown old and wild,

  a broken crying for seasonal change until

  O God my love in time the waste become

  the sure magnificent music of the defeated heart.

  Summer 1940

  SEVENTH ELEGY. DREAM-SINGING ELEGY

  Darkness, giving us dream's black unity.

  Images in procession start to flow

  among the river-currents down the years of judgment

  and past the cities to another world.

  There are flat places. After the waterfall

  arched like the torso of love, after the voices

  singing behind the waterfall, after the water

  lying like a lover on the heart,

  there is defeat.

  And moving through our spirit in the night

  memories of these places.

  Not ritual, not nostalgia, but our cries,

  the axe at the heart, continual rebirth,

  the crying of our raw desire,

  young. O many-memoried America!

  In defeat there are no prophets and no magicians,

  only the look in the loved and tortured eyes

  when every fantasy restores, and day denies.

  The act of war debased to the act of treason

  in an age of treason. We were strong at the first.

  We resisted. We did not plan enough. We killed.

  But the enemy came like thunder in the wood,

  a storm over the treetops like a horse's head

  reared to a great galloping, and war

  trampled us down. We lost our young men in the fighting,

  we lost our homeland, our crops went under the frost,

  our children under the hunger. Now we stand

  around this fire, our black hills far behind,

  black water far before us, a glitter of time on the sea,

  glitter of fire on our faces, the still faces—

  stillness waiting for dreams

  and only the shadows moving,

  shadows and revelations.

  In the spring of the year, this new fighting broke out.

  No, when the fields were blond. No, the leaves crimson.

  When the old fighting was over, we knew what we were

  seeing as if for a first time our dark hills masked with green,

  our blond fields with the trees flame-shaped and black

  in burning darkness on the unconsumed.

  Seeing for a first time the body of our love,

  our wish and our love for each other.

  Then word came from a runner, a stranger:

  “They are dancing to bring the dead back, in the mountains.”

  We danced at an autumn fire, we danced the old hate and change,

  the coming again of our leaders. But they did not come.

  Our singers lifted their arms, and a singer cried,

  “You must sing like me and believe, or be turned to rock!”

  The winter dawned, but the dead did not come back.

  News came on the frost, “The dead are on the march!”

  We danced in prison to a winter music,

  many we loved began to dream of the dead.

  They made no promises, we never dreamed a threat.

  And the dreams spread.

  But there were no armies, and the dead were dead,

  there was only ourselves, the strong and symbol self

  dreaming among defeat, our torture and our flesh.

  We made the most private image and religion,

  stripped to the last resistance of the wish,

  remembering the fighting and the lava beds,

  the ground that opened, the red wounds opening,

  remembering th
e triumph in the night,

  the big triumph and the little triumph—

  wide singing and the battle-flash—

  assassination and whisper.

  In the summer, dreaming was common to all of us,

  the drumbeat hope, the bursting heart of wish,

  music to bind us as the visions streamed

  and midnight brightened to belief.

  In the morning we told our dreams.

  They all were the same dream.

  Dreamers wake in the night and sing their songs.

  In the flame-brilliant midnight, promises

  arrive, singing to each of us with tongues of flame:

  “We are hopes, you should have hoped us,

  We are dreams, you should have dreamed us.”

  Calling our name.

  When we began to fight, we sang hatred and death.

  The new songs say, “Soon all people on earth

  will live together.” We resist and bless

  and we begin to travel from defeat.

  Now, as you sing your dream, you ask the dancers,

  in the night, in the still night, in the night,

  “Do you believe what I say?”

  And all the dancers answer “Yes.”

  To the farthest west, the sea and the striped country

  and deep in the camps among the wounded cities

  half-world over, the waking dreams of night

  outrange the horrors. Past fierce and tossing skies

  the rare desires shine in constellation.

  I hear your cries, you little voices of children

  swaying wild, nightlost, in black fields calling.

  I hear you as the seething dreams arrive

  over the sea and past the flaming mountains.

  Now the great human dream as great as birth or death,

  only that we are not given to remember birth,

  only that we are not given to hand down death,

  this we hand down and remember.

  Brothers in dream, naked-standing friend

  rising over the night, crying aloud,

  beaten and beaten and rising from defeat,

  crying as we cry : We are the world together.

  Here is the place in hope, on time's hillside,

  where hope, in one's image, wavers for the last time

  and moves out of one's body up the slope.

  That place in love, where one's self, as the body of love,

  moves out of the old lifetime towards the beloved.

  Singing.

  Who looks at the many colors of the world

  knowing the peace of the spaces and the eyes of love,

  who resists beyond suffering, travels beyond dream,

  knowing the promise of the night-flowering worlds

  sees in a clear day love and child and brother

  living, resisting, and the world one world

  dreaming together.

  EIGHTH ELEGY. CHILDREN'S ELEGY

  Yes, I have seen their eyes. In peaceful gardens

  the dark flowers now are always children's eyes,

  full-colored, haunted as evening under fires

  showered from the sky of a burning country.

  Shallow-featured children under trees

  look up among green shadows of the leaves.

  The angel, flaming, gives—into his hands

  all is given and he does not change.

  The child changes and takes.

  All is given. He makes and changes.

  The angel stands.

  A flame over the tree. Night calling in the cloud.

  And shadow among winds. Where does the darkness lie?

  It comes out of the person, says the child.

  A shadow tied and alive, trying to be.

  In the tremendous child-world, everything is high,

  active and fiery, sun-cats run through the walls,

  the tree blows overhead like a green joy,

  and cloudy leopards go hunting in the sky.

  The shadow in us sings, “Stand out of the light!”

  But I live, I live, I travel in the sun.

  On burning voyages of war they go.

  Like starving ghosts they stumble after nuns.

  Children of heroes, Defeat the dark companion.

  But if they are told they are happy, they will know.

  Who kills the father burns up the children's tears.

  Some suffering blazes beyond all human touch,

  some sounds of suffering cry, far out of reach.

  These children bring to us their mother's fears.

  Singing, “O make us strong O let us go—”

  The new world comes among the old one's harms,

  old world carrying new world in her arms.

  But if you say they are free, then they will know.

  War means to me, sings a small skeleton,

  only the separation,

  mother no good and gone,

  taken away in lines of fire and foam.

  The end of war

  will bring me, bring me home.

  The children of the defeated, sparrow-poor and starved,

  create, create, must make their world again.

  Dead games and false salutes must be their grace.

  One wish must move us, flicker from our lives

  to the marred face.

  My child, my victim, my wish this moment come!

  But the martyr-face cries to us fiercely

  “I search to learn the way out of childhood;

  I need to fight. I wish, I wish for home.”

  This is what they say, who were broken off from love:

  However long we were loved, it was not long enough.

  We were afraid of the broad big policeman,

  of lions and tigers, the dark hall and the moon.

  After our father went, nothing was ever the same,

  when mother did not come back, we made up a war game.

  My cat was sitting in the doorway when the planes

  went over, and my cat saw mother cry;

  furry tears, fire fell, wall went down;

  did my cat see mother die?

  Mother is gone away, my cat sits here coughing.

  I cough and sit. I am nobody's nothing.

  However long they loved us, it was not long enough.

  For we have to be strong, to know what they did, and then

  our people are saved in time, our houses built again.

  You will not know, you have a sister and brother;

  my doll is not my child, my doll is my mother.

  However strong we are, it is not strong enough.

  I want to grow up. To come back to love.

  I see it pass before me in parade,

  my entire life as a procession of images.

  The toy, the golden kernel, the glass lamp.

  The present she gave me, the first page I read,

  the little animal, the shadowless tall angel.

  The angel stands. The child changes and takes.

  He makes a world, stands up among the cousins,

  cries to the family, “Ladies and gentlemen—

  The world is falling down!” After the smooth hair

  darkens, and summer lengthens the smooth cheek,

  and the diffuse gestures are no longer weak,

  he begins to be the new one, to have what happened,

  to do what must be done.

  O, when the clouds and the blue horse of childhood

  melt away and the golden weapons,

  and we remember the first public day's

  drums and parades and the first angel

  standing in the garden, his dark lips

  and silver blood, how he stood,

  giving, for all he was was given.

  I begin to have what happened to me.

  O, when the music of carousels and stars

  is known, and the music of the scene

  makes a clear meeting, greeting
and claim of gods,

  we see through the hanging curtain of the year

  they change each other with one change of love!

  see, in one breath, in a look!

  See, in pure midnight a flare of broken color

  clears to a constellation.

  Peace is asleep, war's lost. It is love.

  I wanted to die. The masked and the alone

  seemed the whole world, and all the gods at war,

  and all the people dead and depraved. Today

  the constellation and the music! Love.

  You who seeking yourself arrive at these lines,

  look once, and you see the world,

  look twice and you see your self.

  And all the children moving in their change.

  To have what has happened, the pattern and the shock;

  and all of them walk out of their childhood,

  give to you one blue look.

  And all the children bowing in their game,

  saying Farewell, Goodbye; Goodbye, Farewell.

  NINTH ELEGY. THE ANTAGONISTS

  Pieces of animals, pieces of all my friends

  prepare assassinations while I sleep.

  They shape my being, a gallery of lives

  fighting within me, and all unreconciled.

  Before them move my waking dreams, and ways

  of the spirit, and simple action. Among these

  I can be well and holy. Torn by them I am wild,

  smile, and revenge myself upon my friends

  and find myself among my enemies.

  But all these forms of incompleteness pass

  out of their broken power to a place

  where dream and dream meet and resolve in grace.

  The closing of this conflict is the end

  of the initiation. I have known the cliff

  and known the cliff-dream of the faces drowned.

  Stood in the high sun, a dark girl looking down,

  seeing the colors of water swaying beneath me, dense

  in the flood-summer, various as my love

  and like my hope enchanted. Drawn to blue

  chance and horizons, and back as sea-grasses move

  drawn landward slowly by incoming tides—

  and then the final cancelling and choice,

  not tilted as flowers under wind, but deep

  blessing of root and heart, underwater swung,

  wrenched, swayed, and given fully to the sea.

  Heaven not of rest, but of intensity.

  The forms of incompleteness in our land

  pass from the eastern and western mountains where

  the seas meet the dark islands, where the light

  glitters white series on the snowlands, pours its wine