Feats of Courage.

Feats of courage and the heroic death For the cause country or the desert zones Peeping voices low under old stony buildings In wake of the retreating armies of the Rhone. On the hill an impregnable fortress On the ground a mound of hay and mud The battering of bats against the windows In ruins destroyed by the war of mammon. Give us a change of seasons A little pause of breath after the sunrise Two and two along bundled hay stacks An undamaged barn along the ground. Looking across the high window there is A landscape stretching across the fields But the internal bonds of prison keep tying The gaze inwards towards the shields Facing the demigods of death and destruction Muzzled up rifles wolf dogs punitive camps In the verse a demolition a smouldering ash To counteract the poisons of the times.