The mine-detector
 Weaves its old patter
 Without end.

 Words without import
 Are lobbed to and fro
 Between us.

 Forgotten intrigues
 With their spider's web
 Snare our hands.

 Choked by its clown's mask
 And quite dry, my mind
 Is crumbling.

(translated by Leif Sjöberg and W. H. Auden)

I saw this referenced by Arthur Schlessinger in his Kennedy biography, A Thousand Days. Hammarskjöld was the UN Secretary General at the height of the Cold War, seeing first hand the back and forth of a period where Time itself almost came to an end. After his tragic death trying to negotiate a peace in The Congo, his journal of poetry and thoughts, entitled Markings, was discovered in his home. It was translated into English by Leif Sjöberg and W. H. Auden. THis poem struck me as an insight into the mind of the negotiator, who has to put up with old intrigues and has to act as a mine sweeper when attempting to work his way through argument and counter argument, all the while putting on a “clown’s face”.

For more on this remarkable and largely forgotten man, see his biography on the Nobel Prize website at
http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/1961/hammarskjold-bio.html

Best,
Dave Fortin.