I take advantage of your neutrality, your oval face, your radiant beauty, to send news of the blockade to those who on the continent anxiously are waiting. You will tell them from your heart what we are suffering in these days that turn hair white... you will tell them of our feelings, speak the words we've tied-contraband-within your hair. You will tell them of well-founded hatred supporting the defenses round us -our only ragged quilt against the night flowering with hunger and with grief. Your neutrality will carry you safe through the custom's barrier gate, and your bag will carry photographs, a map, two letters, and a tear... You will tell them how we work in silence, dine on silence, drink in silence, swim and die wounded by a hard and violent silence. Go, then, with a torch and spread the news to those you meet outside the walls of this the world in which we see ourselves, poetry massacred and fear always at our side. Go, then, and tell the daily papers, or write with acid on the walls what you have seen, what you know, what I said between two bombing raids that were expected. But tell them that the secret of the towers that keep us up remains inviolate, and hanging from them a flaming flower cries out its pure and incandescent name. Tell them that there's resistance in the city scarred with wounds from hand grenades and as water and provisions disappear anger grows and hope is multiplying. First published in @3The Kenyon Review@1, Volume 22 #1 (Winter 2000). www.kenyonreview.org/roth | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...TO SIR HENRY WOTTON (1) by JOHN DONNE THERE IS NO DEATH by JOHN LUCKEY MCCREERY HIC JACET by LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON A LITTLE CHILD'S HYMN; FOR NIGHT AND MORNING by FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE IMAGES: 3 by RICHARD ALDINGTON FOUR SONNETS: 2 by FRANK DAVIS ASHBURN |