Geoffrey Hill, "Tristia" - "Tragedy has all under regard."

Tristia: 1891-1938

A Valediction to Osip Mandelstam

Difficult friend, I would have preferred
You to them. The dead keep their sealed lives
And again I am too late. Too late
The salutes, dust-clouds and brazen cries.

Images rear from desolation
Look...ruins upon a plain...
A few men glare at their hands; others
Grovel for food in the roadside field.

Tragedy has us all under regard.
It will not touch us but it is there -
Flawless, insatiate - hard summer sky
Feasting on this, reaching its own end.

"Tristia: 1891-1938" (12 lines) from "Four Poems Regarding the Endurance of Poets" first published in King Log and reprinted in Selected Poems by Geoffrey Hill (Penguin Books, 2006) - reprinted in Selected Poems by Geoffrey Hill (Yale University Press, 2009: pg43).