Between Two Prisoners

I would not wish to sitIn my shape bound together with wire,Wedged into a child’s sprained deskIn the schoolhouse under the palm tree.Only those who did could have done it.

One bled from a cut on his temple,And sat with his tousled head bowed,His would for him painfully thinking.A belief in words grew upon themThat the unbound, who walk, cannot know.

The guard at the window leaned closeIn a movement he took from the palm tree,To hear, in a foreign tongue,All things which cannot be saidIn the splintering clapboard room.

They rested the sides of their facesOn the tops of the desks as they talked.Because of the presence of childrenIn the deep signs carved in the desk topsSigns on the empty blackboard

Began, like a rain, to appear.In the luminous chalks of all colors,Green face, yellow breast, white sailsWhose wing feathers made the wall burnLike a waterfall seen in a fever,

An angel came boldly to lightFrom his hands casting green, ragged boltsEach having the shape of a palm leaf.Also traced upon darkness chalkWas the guard at the rear window leaning

Through the red, vital strokes of his tears.Behind him, men lying with swordsAs with women, heard themselves sing,And woke, then, terribly knowingThat they were a death squad, singing

In its sleep, in the middle of a war.A wind sprang out of the tree.The guard awoke by the window,And found he had talked to himselfAll night, in two voices, of Heaven.

He stood in the sunlit playgroundWhere the quiet boys knelt togetherIn their bloodletting trusses of wire,And saw their mussed, severed headsMake the ground jump up like a dog.

I watched the small guard by hangedA year later, to the day,In a closed horse stall in Manila.No one knows what language he spokeAs his face changed into all colors,

And gave off his red, promised tears,Or if he learned blindly to readA child’s deep, hacked hieroglyphicsWhich can call up an angel from nothing,Or what was said for an instant, there,

In the tied, scribbled dark, between himAnd a figure drawn hugely in chalk,Speaking words that can never be spokenExcept in a foreign tongue,In the end, at the end of a war.

From Drowning with Others (1962)