Only a few older poems from Monolithos and then
read mostly newer poems.
This poem is called The Abnormal is Not Courage.
I've always been impatient with the idea
that, like in the old Kirk Douglas movies
there would be a real rotten guy and he would wreck everything.
And at the end of the movie he would suddenly
risk his life to save somebody's cat and everybody would
say, what a wonderful man.
Or the man in La Strada, who's a vicious, selfish, cruel man,
but at the end he's all alone, as he
should have been all alone, dying on the beach
and it's supposed to break our hearts.
I don't wish him any ill will, but if I'm going to grieve
I'm going to grieve for the woman
that he mistreated all through the film.
On the other hand, it's about courage in the same way.
Not the spectacular courage, not the person
that will take enormous risks, but the rest of his life
is not a good person.
That's how we define courage so often.
So this is called The Abnormal is Not Courage
and it pivots on an image from the beginning of the Second
World War when the German blitzkrieg was
sweeping across Poland.
Poland was still very underdeveloped in terms
of armies.
They still had cavalry.
So when the big Tiger tanks, gigantic, terrifying machines,
got close they had nothing else.
So the cavalry charged the Tiger tanks with lances and sabers
and with courage and were wiped out.
This poem, not very generously, is against that, or at least
against it in the sense that it's a dangerous definition
of courage.
The Abnormal is Not Courage.
The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German tanks
on horses, rode knowing in sunlight with sabers,
a magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace and yet
this poem would lessen that day, question the bravery,
say it's not courage, call it a passion,
would say courage isn't that, not at its best.
It is, it was impossible and with form.
They rode in sunlight, were mangled,
but I say courage is not the abnormal, not
the marvelous act, not Macbeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public or for the moment.
It's too near the whore's heart, the bounty of impulse,
and the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not the strangeness, but a leap forward
of the same quality, accomplishment,
the even loyalty, but fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son nor Faustus,
but Penelope, the thing steady and clear.
Then the crescendo, the real form,
the culmination, and the exceeding.
Not the surprise, the amazed understanding.
The marriage, not the month's rapture, not the exception,
the beauty that is of many days, steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence of long accomplishment.