poetry lamenting war #7

[truepenny]

Disasters of War: Goya at the Museum


Streets opening like wounds: Madrid's. The thresh
Of resistance ends before a tumbling wall;
    The coward and the cursing sprawl
    Brotherly, one white heap of flesh
    Char-mouthed and boneyard black.
A woman, dragged off, howls--a lively sack
Of loot. An infant, fallen on its back,
Scowls from the stones at the Herodian lark.
Light is the monster fattening on this dark.

If shadow takes cadavers for her chair,
Where fresh fires glare life lifts a wolfish snout.
    Bruised and abused by hope, the rout,
    Turning, is gunned across the square
    And scattered. Rope, knife, lead
Slice prayer short. A lolling head
Grins, as with toothache. Stubbornly, the dead
Thrust forward like a beggar's senseless claw.
What is scrawled there in acid? THIS I SAW.

Beyond the Madonna and marbles, Goya's brute
Testament pits itself against the hush
    Of the blond halls, the urbane crush--
    Against the slat-eyed, the astute,
    Craning, against the guard, who yawns.
And pits itself in vain: this dark, these dawns,
Vomit of an old war, things the nightmare spawns
Are pictures at an exhibition. We
Look, having viewed too much, and cannot see.

--Babette Deutsch, Coming of Age. Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1959.

LINKS:
Not many. Apparently if you die in 1982, no one in 2003 is interested in you. Here's a brief biography. Her papers are apparently housed online at the New York Public Library Digital Library and physically at Washinton University Library. She has two poems up on Resources for the Study of Holocaust Literature. And then we find the homepage of Babette the Old English Sheep Dog, which can be viewed in either English or Deutsch. *sigh*