Thursday, July 28, 2016

*Poet's Corner -From HistoMat- British Poet John Cornford And The Spanish Civil War

Click on title to link to HistoMat's entry for the poet John Cornford who fell fighting Franco in Spain. All honor to his memory. As I have pointed out in other entries in this space when dealing with rank and file fighters, except those who carried out the dirty work against leftist opponents, despite his Stalinist Communist Party affiliation.

Full moon at Tierz: before the storming of Huesca.

The past, a glacier, gripped the mountain wall,
And time was inches, dark was all.
But here it scales the end of the range,
The dialectic's point of change,
Crashes in light and minutes to its fall.

Time present is a cataract whose force
Breaks down the banks even at its source
And history forming in our hands
Not plasticine but roaring sands,
Yet we must swing it to its final course.

The intersecting lines that cross both ways,
Time future, has no image in space,
Crooked as the road that we must tread,
Straight as our bullets fly ahead.
We are the future. The last fight let us face.

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