HYMN TO THE SILENCES

~ HYMN TO THE SILENCES ~

1942-1945

I

PROLOGUE

Come, Time, apprise me as a dove

Who springs but finds no place to rest,

And bears through time a tale of mourn,

Of painful grief drawn from her breast;

For human sorrow failed to last

Life's rolling hours across the years,

And this dark landscape of the past

Warped with memory's frozen tears.

The voice of horror is forlorn,

A bell which tolls its plaintive sound,

And fades away remembrance born

Where Lethe's forgetfulness is bound.

Save for some whisper of man's shame

Which pierces through the silent days,

A dead hush follows human blame,

The painful facts concealed in haze.

To one who turns a musing eye,

What hope is there for mournful rhyme?

For mortal lullabies that lie

Forgotten in the course of time?

Melponese - I now implore

You! soothe man's aching heart that strives

As life continues with eyes sore

To look upon these hideous crimes.

Take wings of foresight; earthly muse

Inspire this poet with your rhyme,

Awaken early-great poetic use

In verse to voice the hope of time.

With power solemn and serene

Unto our onward lives bring light;

With calm and love we have not seen,

Relieve this world from its dark bind.

We seek to comfort, sooth and bless

With Sorrow fixed upon the dead,

In hope of answer and redress,

Our voice defying human dread.

For the tide of time flows down again,

Its wave with anguish also bows,

And pants within the heart of man

To breathe a thousand tender vows!

II

THE EXODUS OF DEATH

The Ishmaels and Hagars came

From the long Exodus of Death,

Having no territorial claim

To settle their unshaken breath.

Abraham and Jacob to their name,

The people crossed the desert waste

To fill the heart with hope and flame,

And quench its thirst in fleeing haste.

The marah of their tears was fed

Their lives long with unleavened bread,

And bitter herbs reminding them

Of exile and of constant dread.

Interchanged with those of olden times,

The scattered names like summer rain,

Of foreign accent, variant climes,

Record through time the Hebrew pain.

Anathema maranatha!

The phrase rang out with Christian hate

To curse the Jewish pariah,

And summon up an outcast fate.

The portals of the Synagogue

No longer Psalms of David held,

No Rabbi read the Decalogue

For the blind reign of terror swelled.

An accursed Mordecai spurned;

A trampled, beaten people-class,

Living in streets and lanes obscured,

In Ghetto and in Judenstrass.

And yet with pride they walked ahead,

Throughout the world their presence felt,

For in the background prophets led

The living march without neglect.

The great traditions of the Past

Reflected in the book they read,

With background figures vague and vast,

Became the Legend of the Dead.

But ah! blood that the earth has drunk

Of sorrow under human skies,

Does not restore the nations sunk,

Nor serve the seasons that may rise.

III

THE PEOPLE-CLASS

From the end of Antiquity

Onwards with the rise of Islam,

The ancient agrarian Jewry

Declined steadily as a clan.

The passage of each century

Slowly converts the Jewish mass,

Compelled to rely on usury,

They become a mercantile class.

This Jewish metamorphosis

Fanning in time a people-class,

Highlights the economic basis

Behind survival of the mass.

But feeble growth of industry

Constrained by Eastern feudal forms,

Compels the ruling autocracy

To adopt anti-Semitic norms.

Now fleeing these growing censures,

The Jewish masses emigrate;

Forced to face oppressive measures,

In Western lands they concentrate.

With the rise of capitalism,

The displaced traditional role

Of Judaic commercialism

Is absorbed by industry's goal.

Except that with recurring crises,

The regime fails to integrate

The incumbent Jewish masses

Who await their new imperiled fate.

A jingoistic chauvinism

In the midst of the nation host

With budding anti-Semitism

Moves to consolidate its post.

And when the fascist flood arose,

Emerging with new social fame,

A new barbaric racist force

Claimed racial conquest as its aim.

But as the path the war had formed

Began to slant its final slope,

The people-class the world had scorned

Remained defiant with much hope.

IV

THE BIRTH OF FASCISM

In the land of Julius Caesar,

The fascist movement found its hearth;

Nineteen twenty-two - fateful year!

When fascist power came to birth.

The emerging social crisis

Brings the fascist force to power

While prompting plebeian masses

To rise above the looming hour.

The class struggle incessantly

Continues to accentuate,

As fascist shock troops ruthlessly

Seek civil war to subjugate.

While reformist parties cower,

And fail to lead the working class,

The fascist agency takes power,

Giving voice to the amorphous mass.

Having depleted the forces

Of the disillusioned middle class,

The dictatorship now uses

The vise of state to choke the mass.

Finance and private industry

Supporting the official trends,

Institutions of sovereignty

Now gather into fascist hands.

Armed to strangulate workers,

The mounting system serves to stall,

To ward off the growing dangers

Of labor's independent call.

Stifling workers' rising unity

With bureaucratic racist hate,

The incumbent sovereignty

Moves promptly to consolidate.

Backed by dictatorial organs

Misdirecting labor's action,

The regime spews racist slogans

To mark national reaction.

And with its anti-Semitism

To reinforce the racist roar,

Belligerent nationalism

Lunges forward the jaws of war.

V

THE RISE OF NAZISM

Adolf Hitler is appointed

The Chancellor of Germany

With the Nazi party hoisted

To spread its ideology.

The First World War having ended,

The Nazi traits intensified;

The lust for power is augmented

With mass surrender satisfied.

Post war's economic impasse

With its resulting worldwide crash

Brings dislocating shocks en mass

To the Germanic middle class.

The social equilibrium gone,

The fascist storm will now unfold

To give the demoralized form,

And the declassed a social hold.

The earlier national defeat

Linked with the Treaty of Versailles,

Becomes the symbol to repeat,

And to reflect the social class.

The nineteen-eighteen victories

Of labor's movement now desist,

And the political retreats

Collapse labor's will to resist.

Soon after nineteen thirty-three

The opposition is suppressed;

Leaders who may stand in the way

Are confined, murdered or repressed.

Hired killers and secret police

Come to replace the ballot box

For all the other parties cease

As the dictatorship unlocks.

Now! the fascist death-flood rises,

The Voyage of oblivion storms,

And man's social judgment lapses

Into barbaric racist forms.

The Waste Land of futility

Where Faust's Mephistopheles reigns,

Becomes the Nazi Germany

Where anarchy its entrance gains.

VII

THE CAMPS

With barbed wire to surround the grounds,

The fields are spread as camps of death

Where human outrage has no bounds,

And life extinguishes its breath.

A quietly ordered ebb of life!

Now oppressing, conquering man,

Continues to prevail and strife

With Aryan fury turned insane.

Life's future prospects soon foregone,

Starvation then becomes the norm

As man with weary steps moves on,

Laboring hungry and forlorn.

Yet! Sorrow whispers from her lips

The music heard across the grounds

With blithe song kindled at the strings

Voicing Orpheus' melodious sounds.

The living are ushered from around

Into darkened halls of poison gas

With mists of vapors that surround,

And subject man to death in mass.

The film of death obscures the eye

With dark fumes that oppress the plains;

Gone is the melted voice of life,

Turned into substance made to cleanse.

The air exhales its clouds of death

With cries of leaden-eyed despair,

And vapors weep oblivion's breath,

Concealed behind a genocidal veil.

The feeding fires of Hades subdued,

Ashes are blown about the German soil,

Where life bears through the earth renewed

The scattered dust from human coil.

Ah, Death! you came with random stroke,

A smoke-wraith passing through the air,

With darkened cloud and living smoke,

A specter of man's fatal snare.

Earth! doleful Mother of mankind,

Open your eyes to this atrocity,

For Clotho spins the threads that bind

The future for posterity.

VIII

THE REVOLT

The morning comes to consciousness

With faint stale smells of recent death,

As all the muddy corpses press

Against the open graves that breathe of death.

Now! if some voice that man could trust

Should murmur from inside the camp,

"Man dies, nor is there hope in dust,

Let's strive to keep our lives intact!"

Might they not say, "Yet even here,

But for one hour, 0 Life, we strive

To cut out from our minds the fear,

And keep so sweet a hope alive!"

Life then had hope of richer store,

But the remorseless fateful hour

Made life as futile then as bore

Despair of hope and gain of power.

So they passed from a cheerless night

To the glare of a drearier day,

Hoped for the dawn to bring its light,

Alas! the promise had failed away.

They nursed a project in revolt

To meet and greet a brighter day,

They strove to fashion and to bolt

With every doubt long blown away.

Thus slipped the thoughts of life and death

While they rose up against their doom;

Like Paul with beasts they fought with Death,

And yearned to burst the folded gloom.

Oh! living will that does endure

When all of man has suffered shock,

And flows through deeds now made more sure

To rise and form a human rock.

Their dynamite and weapons frail,

Alas! silence now guards their fame;

Whatever their hands were set to trail

Is wrought with tumult of acclaim.

And time that is intolerant

Of all the brave and innocent,

When otherwise indifferent

Now summons honors to be sent.

IX

THE WAR

The bitter day when war had come,

The powers of Europe finally swayed,

And gave way to the fascist home

Whose tempest blind hysterics made.

To shape the world and then to plant,

And crown itself a higher place,

It throve and branched from land to land

As herald of a higher race.

A weeping cloud, a blazing flame,

The warring beast along its Axis main,

In vain pursuit of worldwide fame

Unfurled its flag of tragic pain.

The storm raged on, the wreaths were shed,

The war rolled on in torrent flood,

And yet the sons of England sped

To conquer peace with Freedom's blood.

The warlike of the ocean isles,

The men of field, of air and wave!

Amidst the storm they crossed the miles,

The seas and shores they tried to brave.

Land of October in the course

Of being annexed and occupied,

With new boldness gathering force,

Joins to subdue the fascist tide.

While Europe suffered through the war,

And its great nations sank in blood,

Yet, others watched the tumult from afar,

And claimed no need to stop the flood.

As war marched forward with its might,

The seas of death unleashed their tide;

With the Pacific Rim now in the fight,

American will firmly proclaimed its side.

A hail of helmets from the sky!

Across the sea and up the plain;

The Allied ambush came to lie,

To fill the northern coast and main.

Then Victory Day came with elated tears

To wash away the sorrow and decay,

The burden of the heavy years,

The sadness of the warrior day.

X

EPILOGUE

Come to us, Swallow, with your song

From depths bereaved and unconsoled;

Though life is brief and death is long,

Remembrance rests unconquered, bold.

Ring out our need for mournful rhyme,

Ring out the grief that saps the mind;

Redeem the dream, redeem the time,

The vision to redress mankind.

Spring wakens too; and in our breast

The black sun of our melancholy

With light its shadows casts to rest,

And gleams upon man's future glory.

Bright Phosphor bring the greater light,

Avert our darkness and our sorrow;

Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double bright,

Through human hope transform tomorrow.

There rolls the deep where grew the yew.

O earth, what changes dost thou see!

There where the dewdrop paints a hew,

Rises the Dawn to set man free.

The spiral form gyrating change,

Some thrice Adonis; since, went and came,

Announcing forth the social range,

The flow of blood turning the frame.

The chirping sound the crickets make,

Now echo out to pass away

For the new roots with spring rain take,

And sprout to form the rising day.

The sunbeam strikes along the world,

Its forward beam - the anemone,

Its backward beam - the rose in fold,

The head of Janus bearing both.

And in the desert of the heart,

And in the prison of our days,

The healing fountain now will start

To teach the free man how to praise.

For as the Dawn begins to loom,

Any man's death will diminish thee,

So therefore never ask for whom

The bell tolls; it only tolls for thee.

? Angélique Codina