Barely a twelvemonth after
\nThe seven days war that put the world to sleep,
\nLate in the evening the strange horses came.
\nBy then we had made our covenant with silence,
\nBut in the first few days it was so still
\nWe listened to our breathing and were afraid.
\nOn the second day
\nThe radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
\nOn the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
\nDead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
\nA plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
\nNothing. The radios dumb;
\nAnd still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
\nAnd stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
\nAll over the world. But now if they should speak,
\nIf on a sudden they should speak again,
\nIf on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
\nWe would not listen, we would not let it bring
\nThat old bad world that swallowed its children quick
\nAt one great gulp. We would not have it again.
\nSometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
\nCurled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
\nAnd then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
\nThe tractors lie about our fields; at evening
\nThey look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
\nWe leave them where they are and let them rust:
\n‘They’ll molder away and be like other loam.’
\nWe make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
\nLong laid aside. We have gone back
\nFar past our fathers’ land.
\nAnd then, that evening
\nLate in the summer the strange horses came.
\nWe heard a distant tapping on the road,
\nA deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
\nAnd at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
\nWe saw the heads
\nLike a wild wave charging and were afraid.
\nWe had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
\nTo buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
\nAs fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
\nOr illustrations in a book of knights.
\nWe did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
\nStubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
\nBy an old command to find our whereabouts
\nAnd that long-lost archaic companionship.
\nIn the first moment we had never a thought
\nThat they were creatures to be owned and used.
\nAmong them were some half a dozen colts
\nDropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
\nYet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
\nSince then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads
\nBut that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
\nOur life is changed; their coming our beginning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Barely a twelvemonth after The seven days war that put the world to sleep, Late in the evening the strange horses came. By then we had made our covenant with silence, But in the first few days it was so still We listened to our breathing and were afraid. On the second day The radios […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/HVA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/HVA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/HVA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/HVA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/HVA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/HVA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":316,"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/HVA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions\/316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/HVA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/HVA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/HVA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}