Vol. 8 No. 2 1941 - page 95

POEMS
Whether he sees the joke; whether he cares;
Whether he tempts a vulgar miracle,
Some deus ex machina, this is his choice,
A shrine of whispers and tricky penumbras.
Therefore he votes again for the paid
Clergy, the English hint, the bones of Wilson
Crushed under tons of fake magnificence.
Nor from the zoo of his instincts
Come better than crude eagles: now
He cannot doubt that violent obelisk
And Lincoln whittled to a fool's colossus.
This church and city triumph in his eyes.
He is only a good alien, nominally happy.
Harvey Breit
LINES TO THE YOUNG EVERYWHERE
Called, he went to them.
He took the grave they named for him.
Not yet a boy, the man is done
And the bonfires of his gloom.
Say what incalculable gain defined this end:
The frigid breast in the thick-lipped wind.
No more, he is no more, yet hardly gone:
A wave upon a shore that touched a stone.
Deep his mother across his eyes has gone.
Ashes on a turning sand are less forlorn.
95
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