Barely a twelvemonth
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck.
On the sixth dayA plane plunged over us into the sea.
Nothing.
The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million
All over the world.
But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it
That old bad world that swallowed its children
At one great gulp.
We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:"They'll molder away and be like other loam."We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside.
We have gone
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers'
To buy new tractors.
Now they were strange to
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them.
Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been
By an old command to find our
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.
