POETRY
-"Look in your vanity, 0 vivid man,
not in my grating heart. It is your eyes,
frosty with fallen dark and the great van
of the moon's light, which tell the noble lies
that rend us and praise rending as God's will.
Look in your pride; create the God you kill."
- "1 cannot look into that glass and pray."
- "That cracking is my life, your truth, the way."
447
R. P.
B LACKMUR
WAR
(After Rimbaud)
Where basilisk and mortar lob their lead
Whistling against the cloud sheep overhead,
Scarlet or green, before their black-tongued Sire,
The massed battalions flounder into fire
Until the furnace of affiiction turns
A hundred thousand men to stone and burns
The poor dead in the summer grass. Their friend,
The earth, was low and thrifty to this end :
It is a god untouched by papal bulls,
The great gold chalice and the thuribles:
Cradled on its hosannahs, it will rock
Dead to the world, until their mother, fat
With weeping underneath her cracked black hat,
Hands it her penny knotted in a sock.
RoBERT LowELL
