Previous Poem  |  Return to the Poetry index page  |  Next Poem History by Donald Hall from The One Day: A Poem in Three Parts (1988) When the knife slipped and cut deeply into the fingerpad as he whittled a stick or trimmed ham from the bone, at first he felt nothing, aware only of the nearly insensible line on the skin. Always he imagined for one heartbeat that he might undo the error and prevent the upsurge of consequent blood: Such was the character of Juvenis, who remembered always the doomed legions marching as they left the city, their big arms swinging, or daydreamed that the airplane halted inches from the rockface, like the photograph of an airplane. In my only vision, I Senex await calmly the formation rising rounded from the finger's tip: — brilliant, certain, bountiful. Now, pacing my battlements among sentries, I observe how terrorists burn athletes; terrorists dynamite the former ambassador of the executed prime minister; terrorists sentence the kidnapped president for crimes against the children they will never father or mother: They shoot him through the head and stuff his body into a Japanese sedan's trunk on a suburban street where the regime's corrupt engines sniff him out. In the trench there were several corpses. This was in France. The heels of one stuck out from the dirt of the trenchwall, the scalp of another. The most dreadful thing we saw was an arm in field-gray with a hand, dead-white and wearing a signet ring, that protruded from the wall of a saphead. Wherever we dug for our safety, we dug into corpses, more ours than the French. Whenever a mine exploded, a chowder of flesh splashed through fog and gunsmoke to mark our positions. Shreds of a Frenchman hung from the branch of an apple tree. This was in May. This was in Vauquois. For four hundred years and sixteen generations, I kept my castle while vassals baked flatbread. Hoplites protected the confluence of rivers. When plague squatted in the streets, or when the brawn of Germany crossed the river to cut soldiers and horses, peasants and pigs turned wild in the hills. Drought starved, flood drowned: — Then shires rose in the valleys again. Bowmen and arquebusiers left bones in the Low Countries. Seven generations built the wall. For a hundred years redheaded barbarians walked through a gap in the wall; — but Danegeld accumulated for bribes and fortifications. Cabbages kept over winter. Grapes ripened into wine. Boys gathered the eggs of birds in the June twilights. Oaks cut for the cathedral roof left acorns behind for pigs in the diocesan forest; then oaks grew three centuries under the care of foresters, father and son, to replace cathedral beams when the deathwatch beetle chewed them hollow. And now when my managers fly to Chicago on Tuesday and divorce in Santo Domingo on Wednesday and cremate their stepchildren on Thursday without learning on Friday the names their grandmothers were born to — they weep, they drink a Manhattan straight up, they tremble strapped to electrodes on a table. When he assumed the throne Juvenis concentrated on cost-effective methods for exterminating barbarians under the boy's illusion that he might establish permanent boundaries. When his Reichsmarschall Hanno concluded the Rhine, Juvenis required him to find a defensible durable allweather overland traderoute from Cornwall to Cathay: Tin boxes preserved aromas of Lapsang Souchong. John Ball and Spartacus assemble plutonium for love, constructing a device to reverse history's river. Titus Manlius scourged and beheaded his own son for disobedient heroism. We carried Bhutto to the gallows on a stretcher. He weighed eighty-seven pounds, a sufficient weight; he asked the hangman to expedite the matter. Our imperial goal is simple and simple our mottoes: PEACE FOR ETERNITY        NOT LIBERTY BUT ORDER. Meantime as president-emperor I Senex employ in the execution of governance the expedients of postponement and triage: — These are the rules of rule. What in our youth we considered solutions, what our public relations officers with flourishing trumpets call “Triumphs of Diplomacy,” or “Our Leader's Military Genius,” are stavings-off. When we stopped supplies for our camp besieged on the Blue Nile, we gained petroleum and wheat for the Manchurian campaign; Masada proved no obstacle, nor the Wall. We strangled Vercingetorix to purchase half a year. If a thousand decapitations provide us a century of grain growing, water progressing along aqueducts, and cattle freshening each spring, who will not unbind the fasces and sharpen the axe? Greek fire burnt Saracens at Byzantium's castle and swamps over the same ages advanced and receded — as now in the sour pond a pickerel chokes; as now a whip-poor-will dies unhatched in her frail shell. Whenever mobs rise against torturers and murderers, torturers and murderers rise to take their places and Blues massacre Greens. Men enslave women again and chop the beggar's hands off and tie the homosexual's wrists to a killing post and execute him with prostitutes and moneylenders. Our former prime minister is dispatched by a single jurist who empties a machinegun into his stomach. Our Leader sends a note to the Arbiter, his obedient counsellor, who opens his wrist in the bath while speaking wittily with his entourage. But he dies too fast: Slaves bandage his wrists. Remembering purpose at dawn, he removes the gauze. Tiberius beheads six Jew doctors. By Palmer Canyon the lemons in the irrigated groves grow smaller each year. Here is the Republic's grave, boneyard of Erasmus and Hume, Florentine gold and azure, Donatello's bodily marble, graves of money and liberty. Vertical barbarians ascend, the child armies of passive ignorance. I Senex, president-emperor, peering through cataracts, note that Greek fire has only for the moment prevented Viking and Turk and Bolshevik who scale my fortifications with devoted outrage and howling for plunder break the small-paned windows. Previous Poem  |  Return to the Poetry index page  |  Next Poem

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