Athens and Sparta gripped each other
For thirty years; all those who died
Piled in a single trench together
Could not for an hour have pacified
Insatiable Passchendaele; the dead
Rise in an exponential series
From units in the Megarid
Up to the hundred thousand bodies
Now nourishing the green Ardennes.
If
trophies were to be built for all,
The urns would leave no room for men,
The names would require an endless wall.
History that the Greeks released,
Unconscious of evil, from the lamp,
Now finds its scale so far increased
That atom-bomb and murder-camp
Draw less profusion from the heart
Than a few soldiers killed at sea
When Pericles, in the crowded mart,
Read out his invented eulogy.
DAVID WAGONER
Making a God
His god let people die and had not stayed
Under his fingers in the night
Or in the morning, under the sun
In the afternoon or by the fire at evening,
So he made his god out of clay
And kept it with him. Though he painted it
