Even in a dream how were we there
Among the commissars of peace
And that meek humming in the air
From the assenting devotees?
Police disguised on every chair
Up on the platform. Peace was there
In hands where it would never stir.
Aloft’a battle-plated dove
Throned over all in menacing love.
But why was our old friend Everyman
Among this false-faced company
When we knew that he was sought
Across the border a mile away
By men the living spit of these?
He smiled and whispered he was not bought,
Left us and said he’d soon be back;
An old acquaintance waited below.
The whole room turned to watch him go,
And the eyes said, You will not come back.
Two hours passed: he did not come back.
Then as in dreams a swelling fear
Begets the palpable image, we
Were suddenly climbing through the air
In some contraption old and lame
As Icarus’ handiwork. We flew on
Searching for hapless Everyman.
Indifferent fields, nothing to see.
Then suddenly a crowd, a pack
Of players in some archaic game?
So we would make the riddle say
Yet could not take our eyes away
And knew we were there, had known the same
In many a nightmare: Then it care:
A slowly lengthening horrible tail
Thrust from the ambiguous monster’s back,
The calmly lazily waving thing
That brushes flies on a summer day.
A beast trampling as oxen tread
The annual yield, the harvest play.
For a moment: then we saw the lies
Spring open, watched the rows of eyes
Break out upon the animal’s back.
And all dissolved in a common ring.
At the centre, truly dead,
Lay Everyman. So both were true,
Animal and human, and we knew
These were God’s creatures after all
Ashamed and broken by the fall
Into the dark.
There one stepped out
Who had been but now a hoof or horn
Or drop of sweat on the animal,
And waved and shouted: we must come down.
And the animal was reborn.
We had crossed the border, must come down,
And were again in the conference hall
With Peace the Tyrant’s pitiless law,
While still within our minds we saw
The beast trampling, Everyman down.