Three Poems
98
THE SOLDIER
In the first year of the first war called the
World
I watched a world blaze skyward into States,
And faced across the trenches of a continent
The customers whom I was shipped to kill.
Then Each taught Each to give up for the All
His joys, his reason, and
his
blood;
And those who had lived for profit marched to die
For all the sad varieties of Good.
All integers alike-the young and old, the poor and poor–
Were shadowed past distinction by the deaths
The States
sow~d
over continents like salt.
Those years ..the flesh was levered from our bones.
The atom scratching in the gutted sty
Lost faith in that outmoded evil, good;
And learned, the rifle steady at his back,
The functions of a variable: to die.
The westering lives were steadied to a north
A little different from that sombre pole
The centuries had dreamed was Chance or Fate;
We learned-our poor wits sharpened with their blood–
That last cold center of our wish was Trade.
Where our blood ran the German books are red;
Because we died a bank in Manchester
Ships textiles to the blacks the Reich had taxed.
THE BOYG, PEER GYNT, THE ONE ONLY ONE
"Well, I have had a happy life," said Hazlitt;
Swift's eye was big as an egg.
What did the Moor say? I forget.
The servant who killed Greville cried.
They all died well: that is, they died.
How can one learn all this from Works?
It wasn't Gulliver the keeper beat;
