There's nothing May-like in this toxic air
which further darkens or with blazing light
blinds the dark garden of the foreigner
and nothing May-like in the soapy cloud
casting its veil on the great amphitheatre
of yellow attics ranged beside the mud
of the Tiber and among the purple pines
of Rome: autumnal spring spreads mortal peace,
though disabused like all our destinies,
over the ancient stones exhausted now
at the end of a decade that saw
among finished ruins the profound
ingenuous impulse to start life anew
crumble; now silence, hot but infertile . . .
A boy in that far spring when even wrong
was at least vigorous, that Italian spring
our parents knew, vital with earth and song
and so much less distracted, when the land
united in fanaticism, you drew
already, brother, with your skinny hand
the ideal society which might come to birth
in silence, a society not for us
since we lie dead with you in the wet earth.
There remains now for you only a long
rest here in the `non-Catholic' cemetery,
a last internment though this time among
boredom and privilege; and the only cries
you hear are a few final anvil-strokes
from an industrial neighbourhood which rise
in the evening over wretched roofs, a grey
rubble of tin cans and scrap metal where
with a fierce song a boy rounds out his day
grinning, while the last rain falls everywhere.