Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, FIRST DAY OF WAR, by PAUL FORT


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

FIRST DAY OF WAR, by                    
First Line: Twixt sleep and wakefulness sweet dreams that lightly pass. Calm
Last Line: Dead.
Subject(s): Courage; Dreams; Love; War; Valor; Bravery; Nightmares


'Twixt sleep and wakefulness sweet dreams that lightly pass. Calm of the break
of day! Tranquillity of dream, when from my bed I see the willows' azure gleam!
Beside me Love doth lay his brow. This breathes for sign. Yes, I hear a beating
heart not far apart from mine. No! Droll! I am alone. . . . My fair companion
now the casement sets ajar. I hear the blind miaul. -- Like a cat she must have
gone, -- O, what a fresh delight, in her contour's gentle curve, is my love, so
fair and young, with naught to hide her form save for a floating shawl, as if
the gloom of night still to her shoulder clung.

She whose nature is so gay, so tranquil, that her eye finds all about her way
causes for ecstacy, can she have left me thus the irised dawn to see o'er our
asparagus. . . . What incivility! -- Have you not heard the drum?" -- "Come, be
sensible!" "Have you not heard the village drum?" -- What is there left to do? I
arise. O love in tears! I wish to know at once the cause of these alarms. "Well,
there he is, this dunce of a drummer who doth move my rage. Our ears he charms
with a furious tattoo."

"He halts before my door his paper to unwind. As here the village guard is the
drummer, I engage he comes to reprobate a cock's nocturnal flight, felonious it
appears, or a fat pet rabbit caught by a poaching good-for-naught. This is well
worth your tears, well worth your scrutiny!" "----- What's all this rumpus? --
War! -- At first it seems to me that I'm becoming blind. Where am I? All is
night. Who touched me then? I see, my sight returns once more. What spirit
forces me to gaze while from the sky a rain of frenzied stars crashes eternally?

"Look there!" -- "My love!" -- It's worse even than the tempest's squall. . . .
I feel that I must go, I've no more courage, Paul." On my threshold, what
portend this man, arms raised to heaven, who seems about to weep, and the paper
that he bears which trembles in the wind? And he is not alone. O, that form in
mourning deep, that woman kneeling low to this boy so vowed to Mars. "Help me,
kind gentleman. We must change this. I'm the mother of two sons, one is dead and
this soldier is the other. What is all this that's said of the Germans? Pity me!
Come, this paper thrice accursed, you could tear it easily."

Through the still room a cry shudders, to die unheard. Upon her bed I lay my
swooning love. -- Absurd, but I know no longer where to find things, come, I
mean . . . to soothe her . . . what! I dream twisting her raven hair? Yes,
twisting her cold hair, o'er a cold land I see -- is it Flanders or Champagne,
is it Alsace or Lorraine? -- a ploughshare slowly ride, a peasant guides it
straight, raising for goad the scythe fashioned by years of hate; sudden I see
the sky flame . . . what then do I see? . . . all the furrows tremble now and,
'neath gold gleams outspread, the great, black oxen plough 'twixt crosses of the
dead.





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