AUGUST 22, 1939
“. . . when you want to distract your mother from the discouraging soulness, I will tell you what I used to do. To take her for a long walk in the quiet country, gathering wildflowers here and there, resting under the shade of trees, between the harmony of the vivid stream and the tranquillity of the mother-nature, and I am sure she will enjoy this very much, as you surely will be happy for it. But remember always, Dante, in the play of happiness, don’t use all for yourself only, but down yourself just one step, at your side and help the weak ones that cry for help, help the prosecuted and the victim; because they are your friends; they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday, for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all and the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.”
Nicola Sacco to his son Dante, Aug. 18, 1927.
Angst und Gestalt und Gebet —Rilke
[El miedo y la forma y la oración]
[«…cuando quieras distraer a tu madre del sentimiento de desánimo, yo te diré lo que solía hacer. Llevarla a dar un largo paseo por el campo tranquilo, recogiendo flores silvestres aquí y allá, descansando bajo la sombra de los árboles, entre la armonía de los vivos torrentes y la tranquilidad de la madre naturaleza, y estoy seguro de que disfrutará mucho de esto, ya que sin duda será feliz por ello. Pero recuerda siempre, Dante: en el juego de la felicidad, no lo uses todo solo para ti, da un solo paso abajo, a tu lado y ayuda a los débiles que piden ayuda, ayuda a los procesados y a las víctimas; porque son tus amigos; son los camaradas que luchan y caen como tu padre y Bartolo lucharon y cayeron ayer, por la conquista de la alegría de la libertad para todos y para los pobres trabajadores. En esta lucha por la vida encontrarás más amor y serás amado».]
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Agosto 22, 1939
Acumulados con tanto sufrimiento?
This bundle of accomplishment
Put together with so much pain?
Twenty years at hard labor,
Lessons learned from Li Po and Dante,
Indian chants and gestalt psychology;
What words can it spell,
This alphabet of one sensibility?
The pure pattern of the stars in orderly progression,
The thin air of fourteen-thousand-foot summits,
Their Pisgah views into what secrets of the personality,
The fire of poppies in eroded fields,
The sleep of lynxes in the noonday forest,
The curious anastomosis of the webs of thought,
Life streaming ungovernably away,
And the deep hope of man.
The centuries have changed little in this art,
The subjects are still the same.
“For Christ’s sake take off your clothes and get into bed,
We are not going to live forever.”
“Petals fall from the rose,”
We fall from life,
Values fall from history like men from shellfire,
Only a minimum survives,
Only an unknown achievement.
They can put it all on the headstones,
In all the battlefields,
“Poor guy, he never knew what it was all about.”
Give lectures in universities on cultural advances, cultural lags.
A little more garlic in the soup,
A half-hour more in bed in the morning,
Some of them got it, some of them didn’t;
The things they dropped in their hurry
Are behind the glass cases of dusky museums.
This year we made four major ascents,
Camped for two weeks at timberline,
Watched Mars swim close to the earth,
Watched the black aurora of war
Spread over the sky of a decayed civilization.
These are the last terrible years of authority.
The disease has reached its crisis,
Ten thousand years of power,
The struggle of two laws,
The rule of iron and spilled blood,
The abiding solidarity of living blood and brain.
They are trapped, beleaguered, murderous,
If they line their cellars with cork
It is not to still the pistol shots,
It is to insulate the last words of the condemned.
“Liberty is the mother
Not the daughter of order.”
“Not the government of men
But the administration of things.”
“From each according to his ability,
Unto each according to his needs.”
We could still hear them,
Cutting steps in the blue ice of hanging glaciers,
Teetering along shattered arêtes.
The cold and cruel apathy of mountains
Has been subdued with a few strands of rope
And some flimsy iceaxes,
There are only a few peaks left.
Twenty-five years have gone since my first sweetheart.
Back from the mountains there is a letter waiting for me.
“I read your poem in the New Republic.
Do you remember the undertaker’s on the corner,
How we peeped in the basement window at a sheeted figure
And ran away screaming? Do you remember?
There is a filling station on the corner,
A parking lot where your house used to be,
Only ours and two other houses are left.
We stick it out in the noise and carbon monoxide.”
It was a poem of homesickness and exile,
Twenty-five years wandering around
In a world of noise and poison.
She stuck it out, I never went back,
But there are domestic as well as imported
Explosions and poison gases.
Dante was homesick, the Chinese made an art of it,
So was Ovid and many others,
Pound and Eliot amongst them,
Kropotkin dying of hunger,
Berkman by his own hand,
Fanny Baron biting her executioners,
Mahkno in the odor of calumny,
Trotsky, too, I suppose, passionately, after his fashion.
Do you remember?
What is it all for, this poetry,
This bundle of accomplishment
Put together with so much pain?
Do you remember the corpse in the basement?
What are we doing at the turn of our years,
Writers and readers of the liberal weeklies?
Climbing Milestone Mountain & August 22, 1939 were both written on the anniversary of the death of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchists who were executed in Boston in 1927 for a murder they did not commit.
The Rilke quotation, from the poem “Erinnerung” (Remembering), means “Anguish and form and prayer.”
See the 1950s selections for another Rexroth poem about Sacco and Vanzetti.
You can also see and hear Rexroth reading “Climbing Milestone Mountain” on YouTube.
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