No matter how hard I listen, the wind speaks <br />One syllable, which has no comfort in it-- <br />Only a rasping of air through the dead elm. <br /> <br /> * <br /> <br />Once a poet told me of his friend who was torn apart <br />By two pigs in a field in Poland. The man <br />Was a prisoner of the Nazis, and they watched, <br />He said, with interest and a drunken approval . . . <br />If terror is a state of complete understanding, <br /> <br />Then there was probably a point at which the man <br />Went mad, and felt nothing, though certainly <br />He understood everything that was there: after all, <br />He could see blood splash beneath him on the stubble, <br />He could hear singing float toward him from the barracks. <br /> <br /> * <br /> <br />And though I don't know much about madness, <br />I know it lives in the thin body like a harp <br />Behind the rib cage. It makes it painful to move. <br />And when you kneel in madness your knees are glass, <br />And so you must stand up again with great care. <br /> <br /> * <br /> <br />Maybe this wind was what he heard in 1941. <br />Maybe I have raised a dead man into this air, <br />And now I will have to bury him inside my body, <br />And breathe him in, and do nothing but listen-- <br />Until I hear the black blood rushing over <br />The stone of my skull, and believe it is music. <br /> <br />But some things are not possible on the earth. <br />And that is why people make poems about the dead. <br />And the dead watch over then, until they are finished: <br />Until their hands feel like glass on the page, <br />And snow collects in the blind eyes of statues.<br /><br />Larry Levis<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/for-zbigniew-herbert-summer-1971-los-angeles/
