When shall we laugh?

When shall we laugh together again, my love?

what is the term

set to our durance? How long is our sentence?
When shall we stand close on some windy hill—

the rushing air

making grass-noises in your turbulent hair,
the evening landscape limpid aquatint

and we both seeing it

and laughing like two fools for the new joy
of being ourselves, and knowing that at last

the storm has passed

and our life's sun is coming out again?

Still drags on the old pain

these heavy times have left my mirroring heart
tarnished and warped, corrosive melancholy
has sadly etched the speculum, bit deep

with the devil's art

in criss-cross hieroglyphics that distort
and sourly twist the dull-reflected image.

In these courts of the sun

there is much twilight, and a doubtful shadow

pervades and grips
my mind in its eclipse

as, wearied by the heat, the alien land,
and the unremitting stranglehold of war.
I think of you, yet strive to check myself
from too much thinking. These thoughts are bitter-sweet
when they bring pain with recollected love

but still they prove

the surest landmarks on my life's dark road.

For you the load

is heavier than for me, remotely exiled
where you have never been.

No evocative scene

can move me here to tears, but you are still
where everything may stir a memory—

a half-open door

and the creak of an uneven wooden floor,
but no one enters, save a ghost to your heart

the imagined footstep
and the latch surely lifting

when only a log in the dying fire is shifting.

The sudden agonizing loneliness

met on the stair in the early winter twilight,
the chance-found pencil note on the page's margin
stabbing your brain with the sharp insistent question

'Was it three years ago

he wrote this, or but yesterday? If so,
where is he now, and why not at my side?'

We have been tried

by an implacable hanging judge, our times—
found guilty without hearing or defence:

our only crimes

were that we loved each other, and craved peace,
believed in sanity and tolerance,
sought scholarship and ranked the artist high,
despised the flashy and the second-rate.

But now the great

vulgar and final arbiter, the world
itself insane, nor knowing what it does
ranks these as heresies. For us, the cells.

But through the bars we see

the coming reprieve, and our delivery.

15 May 1944