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Photo of John Clare

Clare, John

John Clare was an English poet, born the son of a farm laborer who came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he is often now considered to be among the most important 19th-century poets. His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was "the greatest laboring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self". English poet

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I Am

 Poem by Anne-Marie Derése, translated by Judith Skillman.

I am the red brand
on the shoulder of the condemned,
the gallows and the rope,
the ax and the block,
the whip and the cross. 
I am the lion's tooth
in the flesh of the gazelle.
In my veins I have
the blood of the slave trader. 

Hangman,
I have deserved the hunger of the wolves. 

My victims have left me nothing
but their deaths.



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