Then I said-- thought next I'd read some poems
about the Spanish Civil War.
The Spanish Civil War took place in 1937 or so.
It was 1937 until 1939.
And this is the time of fascism and Hitler and so on.
And the Spanish Civil War became very much a dramatization
of the struggle between fascism and Nazism and anti-fascism,
which went to communism at that time because both sides--
on one side, the Spanish and the Italians.
Let's just say on Franco side, the Spanish and the Italians.
And on the Republican side, the Russians.
And also a whole lot of international people
who sympathized with the Republicans
of the international brigade supported the Republicans.
I went to Spain.
I wasn't in the international brigade,
but I went to Spain several times during that period.
And so I got a feeling of the Spanish Civil War--
had feelings about the Spanish Civil War
and also about wars in general.
And this is a poem called "Two Armies".
I don't think it needs much explanation.
But the point is that the two armies are out
on a plain and there's very little distance, perhaps about
100 or 200 yards, between the front lines of the two armies.
And it's the middle of the winter and very cold.
Deep in the winter plain, two armies
dig their machinery to destroy each other.
Men freeze and hunger.
No one is given leave on either side,
except the dead and wounded.
These have their leave while new battalions wait on time at last
to bring them violent peace.
All have become so nervous and so cold
that each man hates the cause and distant words that
brought him here more terribly than bullets.
Once a boy hummed a popular marching song.
Once a novice hand flapped their salute.
The voice was choked, the lifted hand
fell, shot through the wrist by those of his own side.
From their numb harvest, all would
flee except for discipline drilled once
in an iron school, which holds them
at the point of a revolver.
Yet when they sleep, the images of home
ride wishing horses of escape which
herd the plain in a mess unspoken poem.
Finally, they cease to hate.
For although hate bursts from the air
and whips the earth with hail or shoots it up in fountains
to marvel at, and although hundreds fall,
who can connect to the inexhaustible anger of the guns
with the dumb patience of these tormented animals?
Clean silence drops at night when a little walk divides
the sleeping armies, each huddled
in linen woven by remote hands.
When the machines are stilled, a common suffering
whitens the air with breath and makes both one
as though these enemies slept in each other's arms.
Only the lucid friend to aerial raiders, the brilliant pilot
moon stares down upon this plain.
She makes a shining bone cut by the shadows
of many thousand bones.
Where amber clouds scatter on no-man's-land, she regards
death and time throw up the furious words and minerals
which destroy.