Hark!
Hark!
The dogs do
bark!
It’s the
socialists come to town,
None in rags and none in tags,
Swaggering up and
down.
Sunday morning,
And from the Sicilian townlets
skirting Etna
The
socialists have gathered upon us, to look at
us.
How shall we know them when we see
them?
How shall we
know them now they’ve come?
Not by their rags and not by their
tags,
Nor by any
distinctive gown;
The same unremarkable Sunday suit
And hats cocked up and
down.
Yet there they are, youths,
loutishly
Strolling
in gangs and staring along the Corso
With the gang-stare
And a half-threatening envy
At every forestière,
Every lordly tuppenny foreigner from the
hotels,
fattening on the
exchange.
Hark!
Hark!
The dogs do
bark!
It’s the
socialists in the town.
Sans rags, sans tags,
Sans beards, sans
bags,
Sans any distinction at
all except loutish commonness.
How do we know then, that they are
they?
Bolshevists.
Leninists.
Communists.
Socialists.
-Ists!
-Ists!
Alas, salvia and hibiscus
flowers.
Salvia and
hibiscus flowers.
Listen again.
Salvia and hibiscus
flowers.
Is it not
so?
Salvia and
hibiscus flowers.
Hark!
Hark!
The dogs do
hark!
Salvia
and hibiscus flowers.
Who smeared their doors with
blood?
Who on their
breasts
Put salvias
and hibiscus?
Rosy, rosy scarlet,
And flame-rage,
golden-throated
Bloom along the Corso on the living, perambulating
bush.
Who said they might assume these
blossoms?
What god
did they consult?
Rose-red, princess hibiscus, rolling
her pointed Chinese
petals!
Azalea and camellia, single peony
And pomegranate bloom and
scarlet mallow-flower
And all the eastern, exquisite royal
plants
That noble
blood has brought us down the ages!
Gently nurtured, frail and splendid
Hibiscus flower —
Alas, the Sunday coats of Sicilian
bolshevists!
Pure blood, and noble blood, in the
fine and rose-red veins;
Small, interspersed with jewels of white
gold
Frail-filigreed
among the rest;
Rose
of the oldest races of princesses, Polynesian
Hibiscus.
Eve, in her happy
moments,
Put
hibiscus in her hair,
Before she humbled herself, and knocked her
knees with
repentance.
Sicilian bolshevists,
With hibiscus flowers in the
buttonholes of your Sunday suits,
Come now, speaking of rights, what right have
you to this
flower?
The exquisite and ageless
aristocracy
Of a
peerless soul,
Blessed are the pure in heart and the fathomless in
bright
pride;
The loveliness that knows noblesse oblige;
The native royalty of red hibiscus
flowers;
The
exquisite assertion of new delicate life
Risen from the
roots:
Is this how
you’ll have it, red-decked socialists,
Hibiscus-breasted?
If it be so, I fly to join
you,
And if it be
not so, brutes to pull down hibiscus
flowers!
Or salvia!
Or dragon-mouthed salvia with
gold throat of wrath!
Flame-flushed, enraged, splendid
salvia,
Cock-crested, crowing your orange scarlet like a tocsin
Along the Corso all this Sunday
morning.
Is your wrath red as
salvias.
You
socialists?
You with
your grudging, envious, furtive rage,
In Sunday suits and yellow boots along the
Corso.
You look well
with your salvia flowers, I must say.
Warrior-like, dawn-cock’s-comb flaring
flower
Shouting
forth flame to set the world on fire,
The dust-heap of man’s filthy world on
fire,
And burn it
down, the glutted, stuffy world,
And feed the young new fields of life with
ash,
With ash I
say,
Bolshevists,
Your
ashes even, my friends,
Among much other ash.
If there were salvia-savage
bolshevists
To burn
the world back to manure-good ash.
Wouldn’t I stick the salvia in my
coat!
But these
themselves must burn, these louts!
The dragon-faced,
The anger-reddened,
golden-throated salvia
With its long antennae of rage put
out
Upon the
frightened air.
Ugh,
how I love its fangs of perfect rage
That gnash the air;
The molten gold of its intolerable
rage
Hot in the
throat.
I long to be a
bolshevist
And set
the stinking rubbish-heap of this foul world
Afire at a myriad scarlet
points,
A
bolshevist, a salvia-face
To lick the world with flame that licks it
clean.
I long to see its chock-full
crowdedness
And
glutted squirming populousness on fire
Like a field of filthy weeds
Burnt back to ash,
And then to see the new, real
souls sprout up.
Not this vast rotting cabbage patch
we call the world;
But from the ash-scarred fallow
New wild souls.
Nettles, and a rose
sprout,
Hibiscus,
and mere grass,
Salvia still in a rage
And almond honey-still,
And fig-wort stinking for the
carrion wasp;
All
the lot of them, and let them fight it
out.
But not a trace of foul
equality,
Nor sound
of still more foul human perfection.
You need not clear the world like a cabbage
patch for me;
Leave
me my nettles,
Let
me fight the wicked, obstreperous weeds myself, and put
them
in their place,
Severely in their place.
I don’t at all want to annihilate
them,
I like a row
with them.
But I
won’t be put on a cabbage-idealistic level of equality
with
them.
What rot, to see the cabbage and
hibiscus-tree
As
equals!
What rot, to
say the louts along the Corso
In Sunday suits and yellow shoes
Are my equals!
I am their superior, saluting
the hibiscus flower, not them.
The same I say to the profiteers from the
hotels, the money —
fat-ones,
Profiteers here being called dog-fish, stinking
dog-fish,
sharks.
The same I say to the pale and elegant
persons.
Pale-face
authorities loitering tepidly:
That I salute the red
hibiscus flowers
And
send mankind to its inferior blazes.
Mankind’s inferior
blazes,
And these
along with it, all the inferior lot —
These bolshevists,
These dog-fish,
These precious and ideal ones,
All rubbish ready for
fire.
And I salute hibiscus and the salvia
flower
Upon the
breasts of loutish bolshevists,
Damned loutish bolshevists,
Who perhaps will do the
business after all,
In the long run, in spite of themselves.
Meanwhile, alas
For me no
fellow-men,
No
salvia-frenzied comrades, antennae
Of yellow-red, outreaching, living
wrath
Upon the
smouldering air,
And
throat of brimstone-molten angry gold.
Red, angry men are a race extinct,
alas!
Never
To be a bolshevist
With a hibiscus flower behind my ear
In sign of life, of lovely,
dangerous life
And
passionate disquality of men;
In sign of dauntless, silent
violets,
And
impudent nettles grabbing the under-earth,
And cabbages born to be cut and
eat,
And salvia
fierce to crow and shout for fight,
And rosy-red hibiscus wincingly
Unfolding all her coiled and
lovely self
In a
doubtful world.
Never, bolshevistically
To be able to stand for all
these!
Alas, alas, I
have got to leave it all
To the youths in Sunday suits and yellow
shoes
Who have
pulled down the salvia flowers
And rosy delicate hibiscus flowers
And everything else to their
disgusting level,
Never, of course, to put anything up
again.
But yet
If they pull all the world down,
The process will amount to the
same in the end.
Instead of flame and flame-clean ash
Slow watery rotting back to level
muck
And final
humus.
Whence the
re-start.
And still I cannot bear
it
That they take
hibiscus and the salvia flower.
Taormina.