In entering the waters of Nova Zembla our words froze
so that however we opened our mouths no sound came,
the world stood still as iced-breath before the nose

like solid cloud, like an amorphous frame
for a lost world where echoes of living speech
might still be found, as if all praise or blame

or intimacy or harshness resided there, and each
of us in our enforced silence might contemplate
the mystery, and hope somehow to breach

some inner law of remembrance, however late,
to find what had been said in the very spot
we left it, our histories, our hearts, the precise date

of their breaking, when they were still hot
in our mouths. But there was terror too
and melancholy, because which of us forgot

the dead we had long stowed and carried through
the journey, the beautiful loved dead, the young
with their rifles and explosives, those who

stood on street corners, the quiet unsung
bodies under the rubble of war crushed
by houses that collapsed like a lung

when the air was sucked out of them, the washed
corpses laid out, the old still queuing for bread,
the leaders hanging in the concrete yard, the rushed

verdicts, the prisons... but what can you do with the dead
except store them in silence, in a cloud of breath
that freezes in front of you? Apprehension, dread,

hope and expectation... history is death
remembered in our country. Childhood is this
frozen cloud, this vanished Nazareth

where we began our progress. We feel the kiss
of that dense impenetrable vapour where
the voice is trapped within its icy ellipsis.

We came to Nova Zembla in good faith. The air
was crisp, the trade routes promising, hull and keel
in order, well-stocked with supplies, with rare

spices to offer potential partners in a deal
of our devising: saffron, cypre, our lives
if necessary. But here we are in our seal

of silence, frozen in, husbands, wives
and children, none of us daring to move.
Is it the voice or the cold air in us that survives

Nova Zembla? That still remains to prove.

A crackling of consonants that broke above our heads
wrote Mandeville. I hear the crackling of machinegun
fire, the crump of shells in a street. Our beds

are in the small room where we are in quarantine,
my brother and I. Our consonants ricochet
above our heads, mysterious, unseen

verdicts on the world outside, which is grey
with autumn, shifting into winter. Being ill
we miss the excitement not too far away

from us, right below in fact, in the shrill
whine we cannot explain with the consonants
at our disposal. My parents wait for the radio to fill

the spaces of anxiety. Who are the combatants?
Whose voices crackle at the world like guns?
Our flags of selfhood are tiny, mere pennants

we play with, only our toy soldiers carry weapons.
Out there a new language is being invented,
new aahs and ohs of grief, new syllabic patterns

out of which grows the peculiar-scented
abstraction of exile, the sour adjectives of defeat
and resentment, for ever defeated and resented,

and the strangest noun of all, a bitter-sweet
embodiment, somewhere between glory
and triumph embodied in the vast feet

of a statue that has fallen, in the memory
of its falling, and the noise, the terrible noise,
of all those consonants writing their own story.

But then we are nothing more than two small boys
recovering from scarlet fever on the third floor.
We cannot speak the language that destroys

the city we live in. Later we will learn more
of it. Only later will we grasp its still-raw
grammar and interpret the inchoate roar

of its history. Practice strengthens the jaw
of saying. And soon everything is crackling.
The vowels begin to flow, the consonants thaw.