Free Selected Poems 1930-1988 by Samuel Beckett Page B

Judea
    Craft by name by nature craft they cry
    About the pretty flyer the angels fly
    Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana hover
    With Icarus round the first airworthy ever
    For those whom the Eucharist transports they now and then make way
    Host-elevating priests ascending endlessly
    The aeroplane alights at last with outstretched pinions
    Then the sky is filled with swallows in their millions
    The rooks come flocking the owls the hawks
    Flamingoes from Africa and ibises and storks
    The roc bird famed in song and story soars
    With Adam’s skull the first head in its claws
    The eagle stoops screaming from heaven’s verge
    From America comes the little humming-bird
    From China the long and supple
    One-winged peehees that fly in couples
    Behold the dove spirit without alloy
    That ocellate peacock and lyre-bird convoy
    The phoenix flame-devoured flame-revived
    All with its ardent ash an instant hides
    Leaving the perilous straits the sirens three
    Divinely singing join the company
    And eagle phoenix peehees fraternize
    One and all with the machine that flies
    Now you walk in Paris alone among the crowd
    Herds of bellowing buses hemming you about
    Anguish of love parching you within
    As though you were never to be loved again
    If you lived in olden times you would get you to a cloister
    You are ashamed when you catch yourself at a paternoster
    You are your own mocker and like hellfire your laughter crackles
    Golden on your life’s hearth fall the sparks of your laughter
    It is a picture in a dark museum hung
    And you sometimes go and contemplate it long 
    To-day you walk in Paris the women are blood-red
    It was and would I could forget it was at beauty’s ebb
    From the midst of fervent flames Our Lady beheld me at Chartres
    The blood of your Sacred Heart flooded me in Montmartre
    I am sick with hearing the words of bliss
    The love I endure is like a syphilis
    And the image that possesses you and never leaves your side
    In anguish and insomnia keeps you alive
    Now you are on the Riviera among
    The lemon-trees that flower all year long
    With your friends you go for a sail on the sea
    One is from Nice one from Menton and two from La Turbie
    The octopuses in the depths fill us with horror
    And in the seaweed fishes swim emblems of the Saviour
    You are in an inn-garden near Prague
    You feel perfectly happy a rose is on the table
    And you observe instead of writing your story in prose
    The chafer asleep in the heart of the rose
    Appalled you see your image in the agates of Saint Vitus
    That day you were fit to die with sadness
    You look like Lazarus frantic in the daylight
    The hands of the clock in the Jewish quarter go to left from right
    And you too live slowly backwards
    Climbing up to the Hradchin or listening as night falls
    To Czech songs being sung in taverns
    Here you are in Marseilles among the water-melons
    Here you are in Coblenz at the Giant’s Hostelry
    Here you are in Rome under a Japanese medlar-tree
    Here you are in Amsterdam with an ill-favoured maiden
    You find her beautiful she is engaged to a student in Leyden

    There they let their rooms in Latin cubicula locanda
    I remember I spent three days there and as many in Gouda
    You are in Paris with the examining magistrate
    They clap you in gaol like a common reprobate
    Grievous and joyous voyages you made
    Before you knew what falsehood was and age
    At twenty you suffered from love and at thirty again
    My life was folly and my days in vain
    You dare not look at your hands tears haunt my eyes
    For you for her I love and all the old miseries
    Weeping you watch the wretched emigrants
    They believe in God they pray the women suckle their infants
    They fill with their smell the station of Saint-Lazare
    Like the wise men from the East they have faith in their star
    They hope to prosper in the Argentine
    And to come home having made their fortune
    A family transports a red eiderdown as you your heart
    An eiderdown as unreal as our dreams
    Some go no further