Malta

HERE’S the island where has burst
the thunderbolt of the accursed:
the rock on which converging fell
all the horror out of hell.

Scornfully the shattered town
spurns the easy martyr’s crown
and with passion turns to mock
in rhetorical baroque.

Where flamboyant pediments
shout defiant eloquence,
and contempt is in the charred
remnants of the proud façade.

Bleaching in the hot salt air
great stone temple-tombs lie bare,
all their ancient ghosts and fears
faded in five thousand years.

But the old gods turn to find
victims of another kind:
though the priesthood's lost and gone,
gifts still strew the sacral stone—
blistered rags of metal lie
dropped screaming from a nightmare sky,
and the bomber finds its doom
in the megalithic tomb.

18 June 1943

NOTES

Glyn Daniel, archaeologist and longstanding friend, recalls SP writing this poem one evening in wartime Malta (Some Small Harvest 1986, 160)