The lions in their den have nothing left to eat.
Their captive roars rise up to mighty Nature: ‘Bring us meat!’
She is the only force they know; she cares
For brute beasts in the dark recesses of their lairs.
The lions haven’t eaten for three days.
Man is the object of their rage; their upward gaze
Through bars and chains takes in, as if to taunt their appetite,
The scarlet sky at sunset, bleeding light.
Their voice, crossing the far horizon, fills
The traveller with terror in the blue dusk of the hills.
As moodily they pace, they swat their bellies with their tails.
Their blood-shot eyes betray their movements now the daylight fails.
The cave walls tremble when each famished mouth
Complains of hunger and cries out in wrath.
The pit is deep: once part of a colossal palace hollowed out
By children of the ancient earth, breaking the rock’s dark heart.
Og and his huge sons built it as a hiding-place
When fleeing from the Israelites; to make the empty space
Which now contains the vault, they hammered with their heads.
By day, the sun’s glare spreads
Its roasting heat into the dungeon; and by night, beyond its bars
The prison has no roof below the level of the stars.
In later years, the site belonged to Babylon:
Mad King Nebuchadnezzar had the vault’s floor paved in stone,
Considering the residence of giants of a bygone age
And home to heroes of the Flood, a fit place for a lions’ cage
Which holds four prisoners: a hideous crew.
A litter of remains bestrews the pavement in this grisly zoo.
Huge boulders, high above, cast shadows on the beasts
Whose paws tread leavings from their former feasts:
The carcasses of animals and skeletons of men.
The first brute prowling round the den
Is from the desert outside Sodom, in the wastes of Sinai.
His former life of savage liberty
Was spent where silence reigns, and utter solitude.
But woe betide the traveller unluckily pursued
Who fell into the clutches of this lion of the sands.
The second beast inhabited the green and fertile lands
Where forests border the Euphrates. When he went to drink
The creatures at the river’s brink
All trembled. Hunting packs
Of two kings, mounting joint attacks
Were needed to entrap this snarling creature of the woods.
The third was used to lording it at loftier altitudes:
A mountain lion. Darkness and horror followed in his wake.
Sometimes, in those days, sheep or cattle suddenly would break
Into a downward gallop from the mountains’ height,
Making for muddy valleys in a mass stampede of fright;
Then all the people fled — shepherd, warrior or priest —
At first sight of the dreadful muzzle of the beast.
The fourth, a fearsome monster, lived beside the sea,
A proud companion of the waves, before his slavery.
At that time Gur — great city, mighty port — arose upon its rock.
Its chimneys smoked; hundreds of ships were anchored in its dock,
Their masts a forest in confusion. To the citadel
Came holy men on donkeys, peasants with their grain to sell.
These people lived as joyfully, as free
As once caged birds, delivered from captivity.
The city centre had a spacious market square;
Abyssinians brought ivory to barter there;
Amorites sold amber, and black garments for the heat;
From Ashkelon came butter, and from Asher, wheat.
The winds of commerce blew these nations’ ships
Clipping across the ocean on their trading trips.
So many people; so much noise: the lion was displeased.
A dreadful plan of action seized
His brutal brain one evening as he lay, brooding and dreaming.
It was the town’s annihilation he was scheming.
Gur was a grim, high fortress; every night
Three heavy bars were dropped in place to fasten tight
The city gate. Between each battlement, put there to terrify,
A horn of buffalo or rhino pointed at the sky.
Sheer, solid and heroic rose the city wall
Straight up above the ocean, then straight down — a fall
Of sixty cubits, where the waves continually smote
The mighty stones, down to the bottom of the moat.
Instead of watch dogs yapping from their kennels in the yard,
On either side the gate two dragons mounted guard
And kept unblinking watch.
Hunters had searched among the reeds fringing the Nile to catch
These gruesome creatures; then a wizard’s weird intelligence
Had trained their brains to constant vigilance.
One night, the lion approached and, with a single bound
He cleared the moat. With frenzied teeth he ground
The gate, its triple bars, its hinges and its locks. Crushed in the heap,
The dragons who had never slept lay in eternal sleep.
Later that night, when he regained
The seashore, of that city and its people there remained
Only a dream — a wall here and a tower there, which ghosts possessed:
The tiger’s shelter and the vulture’s nest.
This lion, crouched on his belly, doesn’t roar. He yawns.
Man captured him and put him in this hole; he scorns
To show the pain he feels to his accursed lord.
His pain is worse than hunger; he is bored.
Back and forth the others stalk; they follow with their eyes
A bird which beats its wings above the bars, to tantalise
Their leaping hunger and the gnashing of their teeth
At shadows, for the bird is free; the lions snarl beneath.
Then, in the darkest corner of this dismal well
A grill half opens; cruel and trembling arms propel
A man, clad in a shroud of white, into the lair.
He steps across the threshold of despair.
The iron doors of death clang shut again.
The man stands with the lions in the den.
With foaming mouths and bristling manes, moving as one, the four
Now hurl themselves towards the man waiting across the floor.
Their great collective howl, which echoes in the cage,
Contains the hate and violence of Nature in its rage.
The man says, ‘Peace be with you, lions!’ and lifts his hand.
He stops the lions in their tracks with the command.
The wolf who disinters the dead for food; the flat-skulled bear;
The jackal skulking on the reefs in search of easy fare
Thrown up by shipwrecks: here is Nature in its cruelty.
Hyenas on the hunt are pitiless, though cowardly.
The tiger waits; then, at a bound, demolishes his prey.
And yet the mighty-striding lion, king of beasts by day,
Sometimes at evening stops, raises a paw and holds it there,
Great solitary dreamer, as the night invades the air.
The lions gather in a group amongst the skulls and bones,
Debating what to do in strangely calm and measured tones.
They look like village elders come to settle a dispute.
They pull their white moustaches; they are wise and resolute.
Beneath a dead tree’s twisted branches each one has his say.
Gravely, the lion of the sands speaks first: ‘Comrades, today
As that man entered here, I saw a blazing sun at noon
And felt the heat of desert wind, the merciless simoon.
I know the power of its breath across an empty space.
My friends, this man has come amongst us from a desert place.’
The lion of the woods speaks next: ‘When I was free,
The fig tree, palm tree, cedar, holm-oak played a symphony
Which filled the cave I lived in with its music of delight.
When all the world seemed hushed in night
The deep green foliage around me sang its song.
When this man spoke, his soft voice took me back to night-long
Vigils, to the sounds of birds stirring and shifting in their nests.
No doubt of it: he has arrived amongst us from the forests.’
The black lion, who had come the closest to the man, now speaks
From memory of mountains: ‘He reminds me of the peaks
Which dominate the Caucasus, a place where no rock quakes.
The Atlas mountains’ majesty is in the stance he takes.
He raised his arm. I saw Mount Lebanon rise up and go,
Casting its giant shadow on the countryside below.
I say this man descends amongst us from my mountain home.’
Last but not least, the lion who in days gone by would roam
The seacoasts, matching with his voice the roar
Of waves which thundered ceaselessly upon the shore
Now speaks: ‘Brothers, the sight of greatness drives all bitterness from me:
The reason why in former years I lived close to the sea.
I’ve seen the waves crash into foam; the moon appear; my eyes
Beheld, within dawn’s infinite dark smile, the sun arise.
My fellow creatures, when a lion has kept such company
He feels at one with heights and depths; he knows eternity.
This unknown man has come from God; the face, the eyes that shine
Calmly upon us here reflect the countenance divine.’
Black night has driven every last blue remnant from the sky.
The guard, a slave, wishing to look into the pit, comes by.
Between the dungeon’s bars he pokes his pale and frightened face
And there is Daniel, standing upright, gazing into space,
Dreaming among the multitudes of stars, his peace complete,
While in the gloom the lions lie and lick his feet.
