POEMS
The dog authority slavering at your throat.
A sense of quiet, or pulling down the blind
Possessed you; punishment you felt was clean.
The decks, the catwalks and the narrow light
Composed a ship. This was a mutinous crew
Troubling the captain for plain decencies,
A
Mayflower
brim with pilgrims headed out
To establish new theocracies to west,
A Noah's ark coasting the topmost seas
Ten miles above the sodomites and fish.
These inmates loved the only living doves.
Like all men hunted from the world you made
A good community, voyaging the storm
To no safe Plymouth or green Ararat;
Trouble or calm, the men with Bibles prayed,
The thin politicals construed our hate.
The opposite of all armies you were best
Opposing uniformity and yourselves;
Prison and personality were your fate.
You suffered not so physically but knew
Maltreatment, hunger, ennui or the mind.
Well might the soldier kissing the hot beach
Erupting in his face damn all your kind.
Yet you who saved neither yourselves nor us
Are equally with those who shed the blood
The heroes of our cause. Your conscience is
What we come back to in the armistice.
349
KARL SHAPIRO
THE DEAD
If after the manner of men I have fought
with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it
me, if the dead rise not?
The maze under the loess
Takes its tribute still. The pilgrims come and go
In Weimar,
all
the graves at Rome are green;
Here Abel lived a month, there Mendel kept
his
spade.
The world throws in its sack another skull.
