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PAR T Between Two Prisoners I would not wish to sit In my shape bound together with wire, Wedged into a child's sprained desk In the schoolhouse under the palm tree. Only those who did could have done it. One bled from a cut on his temple, And sat with his yellow head bowed, His wound for him painfully thinking. A beliefin words grew upon them That the unbound, who walk, cannot know. The guard at the window leaned close In a movement he took from the palm tree, To hear, in a foreign tongue, All things which cannot be said. In the splintering clapboard room They rested the sides oftheir faces On the tops ofthe desks as they talked. Because ofthe presence ofchildren In the deep signs carved in the desk tops, Signs on the empty blackboard Began, like a rain, to appear. In the luminous chalks ofall colors, Green face, yellow breast, white sails Whose wing feathers made the wall burn Like a waterfall seen in a fever, Drowning with Others / 94 TWO An angel came boldly to light From his hands casting green, ragged bolts Each having the shape ofa palm leaf. Also traced upon darkness in chalk Was the guard at the rear window leaning Through the red, vital strokes ofhis tears. Behind him, men lying with swords As with women, heard themselves sing, And woke, then, terribly knowing That they were a death squad, singing In its sleep, in the middle ofa war. A wind sprang out ofthe tree. The guard awoke by the window, And found he had talked to himself All night, in two voices, ofHeaven. He stood in the sunlit playground Where the quiet boys knelt together In their bloodletting trusses ofwire, And saw their mussed, severed heads Make the ground jump up like a dog. I watched the small guard be hanged A year later, to the day, In a closed horse stall in Manila. No one knows what language he spoke As his face changed into all colors, And gave offhis red, promised tears, Or ifhe learned blindly to read A child's deep, hacked hieroglyphics Which can call up an angel from nothing, Or what was said for an instant, there, In the tied, scribbled dark, between him And a figure drawn hugely in chalk, Speaking words that can never be spoken Except in a foreign tongue, In the end, at the end ofa war. Between Two Prisoners / 95 ...

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