TOPICAL LYRICS
And the red priest who bears his oil
To the still bed in night time
Hears each tragedian weep.
Dear child, who should see paradise,
I'd thee absolve of thy mortality
That flourished from immortal time,
Like the cold root and cankered tree
That made Christ's blinding rood.
Or mother within mother-a winding sheet
Stained with rouge and blood.
The vacuum roars in the press rooms,
And the soft announcer's voice clips
Into a beating music.
By rivers, under footlighted cities,
The compact locomotives jostle
Luminous, loud in the night;
The wings of roaring funfighters
Waggle in grey cloud-hung squadrons:
Combustive music, power beyond power,
Rending and rest for the heart.
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The clouds' procession, majesty and dispersal,
The wind that blows all day from the warm west,
The blue-grass pastures and the burnished com
Undulant under the simmer of mid-summer;
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The roughening miles of rye and the rippling wheat fields,
The red foal and the colt with the girl's eyes,
The sweet hay fallen, the clean swathe in the timothy,
The cattle under the elms by the cool water;
For
this
the old men fought with their crooked hands,
Plowing the loam crust in the bitter spring,
Getting their bellies full with the threshers' moon,
And warm wives bedded for the crackling winter.
Consider
if
your commerce on the great sea
Or over the frosty and exquisite mountains
Rumors the failure of these men and their land.
They waken every spring; they hold the passes;
Over the North and South their communion comes.
