JEAN SANS TERRE
Do you regret the feast of Salamis?
The red banquet at the Armada's blast?
Blue admirals fond of your precipice
Are always sinking for a new repast
But see the oozy leaking hulls that teem
With passengers escaped from Tartarus
Sickened they bear as if they would blaspheme
To Thalatta the earthy tetanus
More bent and bowed than the Atridae ever
Fleeing the stolid hatred of the cliffs
Abjuring all their faith and their endeavor
They seek the ocean's vaulted caves and drifts
They are the black pox they are the chimera
They are the plague because they are the mind
And they are vomited by the bitter era
Because they are too wise and too resigned
They left the coast-line of the sunken ages
Where the stone profiles are concealed by weed
They seek by preference your boiling rages
The nothingness to which your highways lead
I weighed their scepters and I took their crutches
I knew their nightmares and I saw their sweat
I felt their daughters' mortifying touches
And their thin patriarchs' lingering heat
Adopt and comfort all this landless host
Who own no sprig of thyme nor leaf of cress
Nor trunk nor stove nor lark nor cloud nor ghost
Nor even the small tree of loneliness
0 welcome all this flotsam of the lands
Ocean: forget your prouder lovers' kiss
And be with all your waves your arms your hands
The errants' anxious mother and abyss
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