Hyam Plutzik Biography

Their heads grown weary under the weight of Time—
These few hours on the hither side of silence—
The lilac sprigs bend on the bough to perish.
...

A miscellaneous screaming that comes from nowhere
Raises the eyes at last to the moonward-flying
Squadron of wild-geese arcing the spatial cold.
...

Because the red osier dogwood
Is the winter lightning,
The retention of the prime fire
In the naked and forlorn season
When snow is winner
(For he flames quietly above the shivering mouse
In the moldy tunnel,
The eggs of the grasshopper awaiting metamorphosis
Into the lands of hay and the times of the daisy,
The snake contorted in the gravel,
His brain suspended in thought
Over an abyss that summer will fill with murmuring
And frogs make laughable: the cricket-haunted time)—
I, seeing in the still red branches
The stubborn, unflinching fire of that time,
Will not believe the horror at the door, the snow-white worm
Gnawing at the edges of the mind,
The hissing tree when the sleet falls.
For because the red osier dogwood
Is the winter sentinel,
I am certain of the return of the moth
(Who was not destroyed when an August flame licked him),
And the cabbage butterfly, and all the families
Whom the sun fathers, in the cauldron of his mercy.
...

What are they mumbling about me there?
"Here,' they say, "he suffered; here was glad."
Are words clothes or the putting off of clothes?

The scene is as follows: my book is open
On thirty desks; the teacher expounds my life.
Outside the window the Pacific roars like a lion.

Beside which my small words rise and fall.
"In this alliteration a tower crashed."
Are words clothes or the putting off of clothes?

"Here, in the fisherman casting on the water,
He saw the end of the dreamer.
And in that image, death, naked."

Out of my life I fashioned a fistful of words.
When I opened my hand, they flew away.
...

A nation of hayricks spotting the green solace
Of grass,
And thrones of thatch ruling a yellow kingdom
Of barley.
In the green lands, the white nation of sheep.
And the woodlands,
Red, the delicate tribes of roebuck, doe
And fawn.
A senate of steeples guarding the slaty and gabled
Shires,
While aloof the elder houses hold a secret
Sceptre.
To the north, a wall touching two stone-grey reaches
Of water;
A circle of stones; then to the south a chalk-white
Stallion.
To the north, the wireless towers upon the cliff.
Southward
The powerhouse, and monstrous constellations
Of cities.
To the north, the pilgrims along the holy roads
To Walsingham,
And southward, the road to Shottery, shining
With daisies.
Over the castle of Warwick frightened birds
Are fleeing,
And on the bridge, faces upturned to a roaring
Falcon.
...