Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, WE DEAD, by JAMES OPPENHEIM


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

WE DEAD, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: When from the brooding home
Last Line: Named, glorying: allah, jehovah, god.
Subject(s): Birth; Death; Farewell; Future Life; Immortality; Soul; Child Birth; Midwifery; Dead, The; Parting; Retribution; Eternity; After Life


WHEN from the brooding home,
The silent immemorial love-house,
The beloved body of the mother in her travail,
Naked, the little one comes and wails at the world's bleak weather,
We say that on Earth and to us a child has been born...
But now we move with unhalting pace toward the dark evening,
And toward the cold lengthening shadow,
And quick we avert our fearful eyes from the strange event,
The burial and the bourne...
That leaving home: the end... Death...

Are these then birth and death?
Does the cut of a cord bring life and dust to dust expunge it?
If so, what are we then, we dead?

For, in the cities,
And dark on the lonely farms, and waifs on the ocean,
As a harrying of wind, as an eddying of dust,
We dead, in our soft shining bodies that are combed and are kissed,
Are ghosts fleeing from the inescapable hell of ourselves...

We are even as beetles skating over the waters of our own darkness,
Even as beetles, darting and restless,
But the depths dark and void...

We have found no peace, no peace: though our engines are crafty:
What avail wings to the flier in the skies
While his dead soul like an anchor drags on the Earth?
And what avails lightning darting a man's voice, linking the cities,
While in the booth he is the same varnished clod,
And his soul flies not after?
And what avails it that the body of man has waxed mammoth
Limbed with the lightning and the steam,
While his spirit remains a torment and a trifle,
And gaining the world, profits nothing?

Self-murdered, self-slain, the dead cumber the Earth...
And how did they die?

A boy was born in the pouring radiance of creative magic:
And with pulses of music he was born...

Of himself he might have been shaping a song-winged poet...
But he was afraid...
He feared the gaunt garret of starvation and the lonely years in his soul's desert,
And he feared to be a jest and a fool before his friends...
Now he clerks, the slave...
And the magic is slimed with disastrous opiates of the Night.

A girl was bathed with the lissome beauty of the seeker of love,
The call of the animals one to another in the Spring,
The desire of the captive woman in her heart, as she ran and leaped on the hills;
But the imprisoned beast's cry terrified her as she looked out over the love-quiet of the modern
world...
Yet she desired to take this man-lure and release it into loveliness,
Become a dancer, lulling with witchcraft of her young body the fevered world...
But no, her mother spied here a wickedness...
Shamefully she submitted, making a smouldering inferno of the hidden Nymph in her soul,
And so died.

A woman was made body and heart for the beautiful love-life...
But of the mother-miracle,
How the cry of a troubled child whitens the red passions,
She did not know...
Fear of poverty corrupted her: she chose a fool that her heart hated,
And now through him no release for her native passions,
But only a spending of her loathsome fury on adornment and luxury...
Ah, dead glory! and the heart sick with betrayal!

There is no grace for the dead, save to be born again:
Engines shall not drag us from the grave,
Nor wine nor meat revive us.

For our thirst is a thirst no liquor can reach nor slake,
And our hunger a hunger by no bread filled...
The waters we crave bubble up from the springs of life,
And the bread we would break comes down from invisible hands.

We dead! awake!
Kiss the beloved past goodby,
Go leave the love-house of the betrayed self,
And through the dark of birth go and enter the soul's bleak weather...
And I, I will not stay dead, though the dead cling to me,
I will put away the kisses and the soft embraces and the walls that encompass me,
And out of this womb I will surely move to the world of my spirit...
I will lose my life to find it, as of old,
Yea, I will turn from the life-lie I lived to the truth I was wrought for,
And I will take the creator within, sower of the seed of the race,
And make him a god, shaper of civilization...

Now on my soul's imperious surge,
Taking the risk, as of death, and in deepening twilight,
I ride on the darkening flood and go out on the waters
Till over the tide comes music, till over the tide the breath
Of the song of my far-off soul is wafted and blown,
Murmuring commandments...

Storm and darkness! I am drowned in the torrent!
I am moving forth irrevocably from the sheltering womb!
I am naked and little!
Oh, cold of the world, and lights blinding, and space terrifying!
Now my cry goes up and the wailing of my helpless soul:
Mother, my mother!

Lo, then, the mother eternal!
In my opening soul the footfall of her fleeting tread,
And the song of her voice piercing and sweet with love of me,
And the enwinding of her arms and adoring of her breath,
And the milk of her plenty!
Oh, Life, of which I am part; Life, from the depths of the heavens,
That ascended like a water-spring into David of Asia on the eastern hills in the night,
That came like a noose of golden shadow on Joan in the orchard,
That gathers all life: the binding of brothers into sheaves:
That of old, kneelers in the dust
Named, glorying: Allah, Jehovah, God.





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