A Pretty Sight. David O'Meara

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СКАЧАТЬ for sharp jabs at your throat,

      stay flush with the column, and above all else

      don’t fall. Not so easy with the friendly shields

      pressing behind, and reaped furrows

      snatching your balance. Our phalanx

      held, shoving, and forced the Thebans

      back over ground they’d claimed at midday.

      But there was a too-easy feel to it,

      as if we expected they’d break, and we’d slide

      through their lines like lava from Hades.

      Word spread of horsemen on the hill.

      A trick? Who knew? We were servants

      to rumour. A few turned and ran,

      then the rest. Then I did too.

      ‘Don’t show them your backs,’ I cried

      to a group, shopkeepers from the look

      of them. ‘Do you want wounds there

      when your corpse is exchanged?’

      That turned them around.

      We still had our swords. Scavenging cracked

      spear-lengths to keep the cavalry off,

      we backpedalled over corpses, boulders

      and olive roots into dusk. That was two days ago.

      More rumours follow us to Attica: Hippocrates

      dead, how we were outnumbered,

      whispers of the slaughter chittering in our ears

      like broken cart wheels. Though we know the direction

      home, we stall, not from plague that still strays

      in its streets, but the shame of retreat.

      Night, the cooking fires again.

      We who are left, battered stragglers, scoop gruel

      and wait for orders to seek out our dead.

      Now, on the edge of the firelight, a rhapsode

      recites an ancient passage, his voice recalling Troy,

      the dark-beaked ships and grief for Patroclus.

      We were brave enough, but couldn’t hold.

      What use is a story or a song?

      The Afterlives of Hans and Sophie Scholl

      ‘Allen Gewalten zum Trotz sich erhalten’

       ‘Despite all the powers closing in, hold yourself up’

      – Goethe

      After the war, he stays underground,

      still wary of the necessary

      horse trades and occupying powers.

       Le Monde, Die Zeit, New York

      Times; Vietnam, Rwanda, Srebrenica:

      years go by. In the stone arch of a busy

      coffee house, Sophie is waving him over

      past the billiards table, unfazed, looking

      for all the world like she’s just

      breezed in from 1933

      and there’s no nightmare to come.

      But the picture’s all wrong, her face

      unaged, and where are Alex,

      Willi or Christoph?

      Sophie sighs, presses

      a hand against her brother’s cheek.

      ‘Hans, it’s because we died.’

      She describes the trial,

      its forgone verdict, the bulbs

      that burned all night in their cells,

      the shared last cigarette

      in the courtyard. Hans has turned

      the details over again,

      his memory tightening the blurs

      like a Leica lens while the tension

      in his face subsides

      in the respite of knowing

      at least they tried. They’re even laughing,

      aping the parrot shrieks

      of Friesler’s indignation,

      gossiping over the Führer’s last pose,

      Hans with a finger

      cocked against his temple.

      They order café viennois.

      Sophie pokes at the dollops of whip

      while ordered traffic crawls

      past the painted glass

      of the window. The newest papers

      in wooden clips

      fanned across

      the billiard nap. Skinhead rallies,

      latest dictatorships. Hans makes

      another hopeless gesture.

      Did everything change, or nothing?

      Coffees done, they consider the years

      like doors they never entered,

      as if history’s just a lot

      of people trying

      to get from one room

      to another. Outside, Hans

      mounts the steps of a slowing tram.

      Sophie ties her hair back

      with СКАЧАТЬ