The Survivor Among Graves

There are fields beyond. The world there obeys

The living Word; names, numbers do for this.

The grave’s cross, the grave’s grass, the grave’s polished granite

These died that we might live

-that I may livel

Are customary, but not necessary;

This world needs only the dead.

That all-replacing dream

Through which our dark lives led in waiting

The dream I woke to, that holds you sleepers still

What is it now, The War? A war now, numbered

As your lives and graves are numbered; that one can lose,

That we have lost. … Lost too, the overmastering

Demand that delivered us from all demands

Except its metal Live-that left bare life

The sense life made, stripping from all there is

Its old, own sense, till simply to restore

One: to sit reading the papers on a Sunday morning

Was enough, an end beyond all ends, the dream

Dreams dream of. … until this, at last restored,

Was an end no longer, and the senselessness

Our lives had reached from seemed to us the sense

We had reached for; and we saw that we had lived

For some years longer than the rest within

The future where, the child says, we shall live.

Where shall we live? For your lives are not lived

But, there in mid-air, cease, and do not fall

And are what is not, but that might have been.

And ours are-what they are; and, slowly, end.

Our lives have made their peace with the existence

That has leached from their old essences, in time,

All that is not itself. What we remember

You are: a waiting. … Without you, all you dead,

What rag could wipe this scrawled slate clean of life,

What haunted body guess for me the world

Of which this earth, this life, are one spoiled seed?

We endure to fulfillment; it is victory

The living lose. And loss? The living lose

All things alike: and, recompensed, in the survival

That brings them, daily, that indifference, death,

Ride in the triumph of the world in chains

Their world, their triumph. … We sleep lightly; waking,

Some still success, succession, weighs us down,

Enchanting our limbs to yours-our veins averted

Into another world, our vacant hope

Long since fulfilled, our last necessity

Remembered sometimes, with the accustomed smile

Of cold acceptance, as the luxury our youth

Demanded ignorantly. Your ignorance

Is immortal in your deaths, a spring

Of blood to which the living come, to bend

In dry half-dreaming supplication. …

The haunters and the haunted, among graves,

Mirror each other sightlessly; in soundless

Supplication, a last unheard

Unison, reach to each other: Say again,

Say the voices, say again

That life is–what it is not;

That, somewhere, there is something, something;

That we are waiting; that we are waiting.