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Noon passes in this twentieth century.
My pretty wife sleeps in a hospital bed.
Noon passes in this twentieth century.
My young wife's pretty eyes are dying.
Noon passes in this twentieth century.
I watch the helpless hands
I watch the helpless eyes
Of all the sad doctors.
You build great aeroplanes,
You build lightning missiles,
Force powerful energy
Into small bombs.
Noon passes in this twentieth century.
O men men men
Can you promise nothing but death
To we who settle this planet?
O men men men
Noon passes in this twentieth century.
Why can't you kill
a microbe
devouring
the heart
of my pretty wife
of my young wife?
Noon passes in this twentieth century.
From Poetry Review, Vol. 59 no. 4, Winter 1968/9
Translated by Zdzislaw Zazula
A shotgun in her parlour, Amazon says Enter.
A barefoot wedding. She gestures like treacle,
a guttering of purple in a dugout canoe on the
dream banks of the living room carpet. A diva, she
demands more body. Her want is citrus scented.
She waits in silence, a pulsating black
widow's abdomen. A calling. When you finally
wade into the first-sex smell of nectarines, she
tells you a night-time scare story : of alien
autopsy, the power of the drum, and the psychic
potential of humankind. Designed to send your
blood into the web. "Relinquish" she mouths into
the spaces between your outstretched fingers. Give
way to the sinking vibration of a temple bell. Let
her drop you, head first into the green with
nothing more to cling to than the ozone, ivy and
spider within.
After dark I call you up,
just to hear the weather report,
that the nights are drawing in now,
and how much you paid
for your latest pair of trousers.
You’ll tell me the one about
PLUTO, the giant pipeline rolling out
under the Channel on a steel drum,
how it kept the tanks fed
for our boys on the continent,
how the ice cream hut along the bay
was really a pump in disguise,
like those Ruperts that kept the Führer
guessing. And the Kamikaze who’d blaze
unswerving to the end, the enemy
you couldn’t help but admire. And I’ll
sing you American Pie again,
like that last night in the hospital,
however many times you try to die.
