Flowers for Hitler

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Flowers for Hitler Page 9

by Leonard Cohen


  A strange public generosity prevails.

  Only too well he knows the tiny moment when

  everything is possible, when pride is loved, beauty held

  in common, like having an exquisite sister,

  and a man gives away his death like a piece of advice.

  Our Kerensky has waited for these moments

  over a table in a rented room

  when poems grew like butterflies on the garbage of his life.

  How many times? The sad answer is: they can be counted.

  Possible and brief: this is his vision of Revolution.

  Who will parade the shell today? Who will kill in the name

  of the husk? Who will write a Law to raise the corpse

  which cries now only for weeds and excrement?

  See him walk the streets, the last guard, the only idler

  on the square. He must keep the wreck of the Revolution

  the debris of public beauty

  from the pure smiling eyes of the trained visionaries

  who need our daily lives perfect.

  The soft snow begins to honour him with epaulets, and to provoke the animal past of his fur hat. He wears a death, but he allows the snow, like an ultimate answer, to forgive him, just for this jewelled moment of his coronation. The carved gargoyles of the City Hall receive the snow as bibs beneath their drooling lips. How they resemble the men of profane vision, the same greed, the same intensity as they who whip their minds to recall an ancient lucky orgasm, yes, yes, he knows that deadly concentration, they are the founders, they are the bankers – of History! He rests in his walk as they consume of the generous night everything that he does not need.

  ANOTHER NIGHT WITH TELESCOPE

  Come back to me

  brutal empty room

  Thin Byzantine face

  preside over this new fast

  I am broken with easy grace

  Let me be neither

  father nor child

  but one who spins

  on an eternal unimportant loom

  patterns of wars and grass

  which do not last the night

  I know the stars

  are wild as dust

  and wait for no man’s discipline

  but as they wheel

  from sky to sky they rake

  our lives with pins of light

 

 

 


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