POEMS
Then fade ineffectually
As the buildings fall. Young men
And even girls
Without the cunning fed by deep root-reaching
And the not entirely glorious love
Of life, sole giver of glory.
II.
The simplification of babies begins!
Shall this then be the one effect
Of pulling heaven down: that death
And glory shall keep their place no longer
At the end, or at least at that point near the middle
Where ends join a new rise of the curve?
The celestial collapse has brought
A dumb finality upon the streets,
And boys and girls unlearn their crafty search
For one another.
Imagine!
The angels are not yet vaporised.
The monuments on which we wrote o-qr names
In chalk, the marks commemorating Us,
Are now wiped clean by other boys
With white dust on their shoulders
And stares daffy with space.
Hordes, barrack-loads of greatness!
Deltas of the immortal, dumps of divinity!
355
And the miraculous ruses of rotation unlearned, forgotten.
The lover of life has cunning, is not
A once-mandated messenger of no-time,
Gives not his perfect flesh as clay
For the statue's stained and reeking base,
Its corners full of ants;
Hopes not to fashion a whiteness in the city–
A streak of abandon, and a lackey's grave.
