10 Best Famous Needles Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Needles poems. This is a select list of the best famous Needles poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Needles poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of needles poems.

• All Famous Needles Poems

 Mrs Moon
sitting up in the sky
little old lady
rock-a-bye
with a ball of fading light
and silvery needles
knitting the night

 When I get to be a composer
I'm gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I'm gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I'm gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I'm gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.

 Every month or so, Sundays, we walked the line,
The limit and the boundary. Past the sweet gum
Superb above the cabin, along the wall—
Stones gathered from the level field nearby
When first we cleared it. (Angry bumblebees
Stung the two mules. They kicked. Thirteen, I ran.)
And then the field: thread-leaf maple, deciduous
Magnolia, hybrid broom, and, further down,
In light shade, one Franklinia Alatamaha
In solstice bloom, all white, most graciously.
On the sunnier slope, the wild plums that my mother
Later would make preserves of, to give to friends
Or sell, in autumn, with the foxgrape, quince,
Elderberry, and muscadine. Around
The granite overhang, moist den of foxes;
Gradually up a long hill, high in pine,
Park-like, years of dry needles on the ground,
And dogwood, slopes the settlers terraced; pine
We cut at Christmas, berries, hollies, anise,
And cones for sale in Mister Haymore’s yard
In town, below the Courthouse Square. James Haymore,
One of the two good teachers at Boys’ High,
Ironic and demanding, chemistry;
Mary Lou Culver taught us English: essays,
Plot summaries, outlines, meters, kinds of clauses
(Noun, adjective, and adverb, five at a time),
Written each day and then revised, and she
Up half the night to read them once again
Through her pince-nez, under a single lamp.
Across the road, on a steeper hill, the settlers
Set a house, unpainted, the porch fallen in,
The road a red clay strip without a bridge,
A shallow stream that liked to overflow.
Oliver Brand’s mules pulled our station wagon
Out of the gluey mire, earth’s rust. Then, here
And there, back from the road, the specimen
Shrubs and small trees my father planted, some
Taller than we were, some in bloom, some berried,
And some we still brought water to. We always
Paused at the weed-filled hole beside the beech
That, one year, brought forth beech nuts by the thousands,
A hole still reminiscent of the man
Chewing tobacco in among his whiskers
My father happened on, who, discovered, told
Of dreaming he should dig there for the gold
And promised to give half of what he found. 

During the wars with Germany and Japan,
Descendents of the settlers, of Oliver Brand
And of that man built Flying Fortresses
For Lockheed, in Atlanta; now they build
Brick mansions in the woods they left, with lawns
To paved and lighted streets, azaleas, camellias
Blooming among the pines and tulip trees—
Mercedes Benz and Cadillac Republicans.
There was another stream further along 
Divided through a marsh, lined by the fence
We stretched to posts with Mister Garner’s help
The time he needed cash for his son’s bail
And offered all his place. A noble spring
Under the oak root cooled his milk and butter.
He called me “honey,” working with us there
(My father bought three acres as a gift),
His wife pale, hair a country orange, voice
Uncanny, like a ghost’s, through the open door
Behind her, chickens scratching on the floor.
Barred Rocks, our chickens; one, a rooster, splendid
Sliver and grey, red comb and long sharp spurs,
Once chased Aunt Jennie as far as the daphne bed
The two big king snakes were familiars of.
My father’s dog would challenge him sometimes
To laughter and applause. Once, in Stone Mountain,
Travelers, stopped for gas, drove off with Smokey;
Angrily, grievingly, leaving his work, my father
Traced the car and found them way far south,
Had them arrested and, bringing Smokey home,
Was proud as Sherlock Holmes, and happier.
Above the spring, my sister’s cats, black Amy,
Grey Junior, down to meet us. The rose trees,
Domestic, Asiatic, my father’s favorites.
The bridge, marauding dragonflies, the bullfrog,
Camellias cracked and blackened by the freeze,
Bay tree, mimosa, mountain laurel, apple, 
Monkey pine twenty feet high, banana shrub,
The owls’ tall pine curved like a flattened S.
The pump house Mort and I built block by block,
Smooth concrete floor, roof pale aluminum
Half-covered by a clematis, the pump 
Thirty feet down the mountain’s granite foot. 

Mort was the hired man sent to us by Fortune,
Childlike enough to lead us. He brought home,
Although he could not even drive a tractor,
Cheated, a worthless car, which we returned.
When, at the trial to garnishee his wages,
Frank Guess, the judge, Grandmother’s longtime neighbor,
Whose children my mother taught in Cradle Roll,
Heard Mort’s examination, he broke in
As if in disbelief on the bank’s attorneys:
“Gentlemen, must we continue this charade?”
Finally, past the compost heap, the garden,
Tomatoes and sweet corn for succotash,
Okra for frying, Kentucky Wonders, limas,
Cucumbers, squashes, leeks heaped round with soil,
Lavender, dill, parsley, and rosemary,
Tithonia and zinnias between the rows;
The greenhouse by the rock wall, used for cuttings
In late spring, frames to grow them strong for planting
Through winter into summer. Early one morning
Mort called out, lying helpless by the bridge.
His ashes we let drift where the magnolia
We planted as a stem divides the path
The others lie, too young, at Silver Hill,
Except my mother. Ninety-five, she lives
Three thousand miles away, beside the bare
Pacific, in rooms that overlook the Mission,
The Riviera, and the silver range 
La Cumbre east. Magnolia grandiflora
And one druidic live oak guard the view. 
Proudly around the walls, she shows her paintings
Of twenty years ago: the great oak’s arm
Extended, Zeuslike, straight and strong, wisteria
Tangled among the branches, amaryllis
Around the base; her cat, UC, at ease
In marigolds; the weeping cherry, pink
And white arms like a blessing to the blue
Bird feeder Mort made; cabin, scarlet sweet gum
Superb when tribes migrated north and south.
Alert, still quick of speech, a little blind,
Active, ready for laughter, open to fear,
Pity, and wonder that such things may be,
Some Sundays, I think, she must walk the line,
Aunt Jennie, too, if she were still alive,
And Eleanor, whose story is untold,
Their presences like muses, prompting me
In my small study, all listening to the sea,
All of one mind, the true posterity.

 I

I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,
Forged in man's minerals, the brassy orator
Laying my ghost in metal,
The scales of this twin world tread on the double,
My half ghost in armour hold hard in death's corridor,
To my man-iron sidle.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,
Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season
Worked on a world of petals;
She threads off the sap and needles, blood and bubble
Casts to the pine roots, raising man like a mountain
Out of the naked entrail.

Beginning with doom in the ghost, and the springing marvels,
Image of images, my metal phantom
Forcing forth through the harebell,
My man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, unmortal,
I, in my fusion of rose and male motion,
Create this twin miracle.

This is the fortune of manhood: the natural peril,
A steeplejack tower, bonerailed and masterless,
No death more natural;
Thus the shadowless man or ox, and the pictured devil,
In seizure of silence commit the dead nuisance.
The natural parallel.

My images stalk the trees and the slant sap's tunnel,
No tread more perilous, the green steps and spire
Mount on man's footfall,
I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles,
In the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower,
Hearing the weather fall.

Intricate manhood of ending, the invalid rivals,
Voyaging clockwise off the symboled harbour,
Finding the water final,
On the consumptives' terrace taking their two farewells,
Sail on the level, the departing adventure,
To the sea-blown arrival.

II

They climb the country pinnacle,
Twelve winds encounter by the white host at pasture,
Corner the mounted meadows in the hill corral;
They see the squirrel stumble,
The haring snail go giddily round the flower,
A quarrel of weathers and trees in the windy spiral.

As they dive, the dust settles,
The cadaverous gravels, falls thick and steadily,
The highroad of water where the seabear and mackerel
Turn the long sea arterial
Turning a petrol face blind to the enemy
Turning the riderless dead by the channel wall.

(Death instrumental,
Splitting the long eye open, and the spiral turnkey,
Your corkscrew grave centred in navel and nipple,
The neck of the nostril,
Under the mask and the ether, they making bloody
The tray of knives, the antiseptic funeral;

Bring out the black patrol,
Your monstrous officers and the decaying army,
The sexton sentinel, garrisoned under thistles,
A cock-on-a-dunghill
Crowing to Lazarus the morning is vanity,
Dust be your saviour under the conjured soil.)

As they drown, the chime travels,
Sweetly the diver's bell in the steeple of spindrift
Rings out the Dead Sea scale;
And, clapped in water till the triton dangles,
Strung by the flaxen whale-weed, from the hangman's raft,
Hear they the salt glass breakers and the tongues of burial.

(Turn the sea-spindle lateral,
The grooved land rotating, that the stylus of lightning
Dazzle this face of voices on the moon-turned table,
Let the wax disk babble
Shames and the damp dishonours, the relic scraping.
These are your years' recorders. The circular world stands still.)

III

They suffer the undead water where the turtle nibbles,
Come unto sea-stuck towers, at the fibre scaling,
The flight of the carnal skull
And the cell-stepped thimble;
Suffer, my topsy-turvies, that a double angel
Sprout from the stony lockers like a tree on Aran.

Be by your one ghost pierced, his pointed ferrule,
Brass and the bodiless image, on a stick of folly
Star-set at Jacob's angle,
Smoke hill and hophead's valley,
And the five-fathomed Hamlet on his father's coral
Thrusting the tom-thumb vision up the iron mile.

Suffer the slash of vision by the fin-green stubble,
Be by the ships' sea broken at the manstring anchored
The stoved bones' voyage downward
In the shipwreck of muscle;
Give over, lovers, locking, and the seawax struggle,
Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels.

And in the pincers of the boiling circle,
The sea and instrument, nicked in the locks of time,
My great blood's iron single
In the pouring town,
I, in a wind on fire, from green Adam's cradle,
No man more magical, clawed out the crocodile.

Man was the scales, the death birds on enamel,
Tail, Nile, and snout, a saddler of the rushes,
Time in the hourless houses
Shaking the sea-hatched skull,
And, as for oils and ointments on the flying grail,
All-hollowed man wept for his white apparel.

Man was Cadaver's masker, the harnessing mantle,
Windily master of man was the rotten fathom,
My ghost in his metal neptune
Forged in man's mineral.
This was the god of beginning in the intricate seawhirl,
And my images roared and rose on heaven's hill.

 In the dour ages
Of drafty cells and draftier castles,
Of dragons breathing without the frame of fables,
Saint and king unfisted obstruction's knuckles
By no miracle or majestic means,

But by such abuses
As smack of spite and the overscrupulous
Twisting of thumbscrews: one soul tied in sinews,
One white horse drowned, and all the unconquered pinnacles
Of God's city and Babylon's

Must wait, while here Suso's
Hand hones his tack and needles,
Scouraging to sores his own red sluices
For the relish of heaven, relentless, dousing with prickles
Of horsehair and lice his horny loins;
While there irate Cyrus
Squanders a summer and the brawn of his heroes
To rebuke the horse-swallowing River Gyndes:
He split it into three hundred and sixty trickles
A girl could wade without wetting her shins.

Still, latter-day sages,
Smiling at this behavior, subjugating their enemies
Neatly, nicely, by disbelief or bridges,
Never grip, as the grandsires did, that devil who chuckles
From grain of the marrow and the river-bed grains.

 I. Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn

Because you have found me in the pitch-dark night
With open book you ask me what I do.
Mark and digest my tale, carry it afar
To those that never saw this tonsured head
Nor heard this voice that ninety years have cracked.
Of Baile and Aillinn you need not speak,
All know their tale, all know what leaf and twig,
What juncture of the apple and the yew,
Surmount their bones; but speak what none have heard.

The miracle that gave them such a death
Transfigured to pure substance what had once
Been bone and sinew; when such bodies join
There is no touching here, nor touching there,
Nor straining joy, but whole is joined to whole;
For the intercourse of angels is a light
Where for its moment both seem lost, consumed.

Here in the pitch-dark atmosphere above
The trembling of the apple and the yew,
Here on the anniversary of their death,
The anniversary of their first embrace,
Those lovers, purified by tragedy,
Hurry into each other's arms; these eyes,
By water, herb and solitary prayer
Made aquiline, are open to that light.
Though somewhat broken by the leaves, that light
Lies in a circle on the grass; therein
I turn the pages of my holy book.

II. Ribh denounces Patrick

An abstract Greek absurdity has crazed the man -
Recall that masculine Trinity. Man, woman, child 
 (daughter or son),
That's how all natural or supernatural stories run.

Natural and supernatural with the self-same ring are wed.
As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead begets 
 Godhead,
For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.

Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind;
When the conflagration of their passion sinks, damped by the 
 body or the mind,
That juggling nature mounts, her coil in their embraces 
 twined.

The mirror-scaled serpent is multiplicity,
But all that run in couples, on earth, in flood or air, share God that is but three,
And could beget or bear themselves could they but love as He.

III. Ribh in Ecstasy

What matter that you understood no word!
Doubtless I spoke or sang what I had heard
In broken sentences. My soul had found
All happiness in its own cause or ground.
Godhead on Godhead in sexual spasm begot
Godhead. Some shadow fell. My soul forgot
Those amorous cries that out of quiet come
And must the common round of day resume.

IV. There

There all the barrel-hoops are knit,
There all the serpent-tails are bit,
There all the gyres converge in one,
There all the planets drop in the Sun.

V. Ribh considers Christian Love insufficient

Why should I seek for love or study it?
It is of God and passes human wit.
I study hatred with great diligence,
For that's a passion in my own control,
A sort of besom that can clear the soul
Of everything that is not mind or sense.

Why do I hate man, woman or event?
That is a light my jealous soul has sent.
From terror and deception freed it can
Discover impurities, can show at last
How soul may walk when all such things are past,
How soul could walk before such things began.

Then my delivered soul herself shall learn
A darker knowledge and in hatred turn
From every thought of God mankind has had.
Thought is a garment and the soul's a bride
That cannot in that trash and tinsel hide:
Hatred of God may bring the soul to God.

At stroke of midnight soul cannot endure
A bodily or mental furniture.
What can she take until her Master give!
Where can she look until He make the show!
What can she know until He bid her know!
How can she live till in her blood He live!

VI. He and She

As the moon sidles up
Must she sidle up,
As trips the scared moon
Away must she trip:
'His light had struck me blind
Dared I stop".

She sings as the moon sings:
'I am I, am I;
The greater grows my light
The further that I fly.'
All creation shivers
With that sweet cry.

VII. What Magic Drum?

He holds him from desire, all but stops his breathing lest
primordial Motherhood forsake his limbs, the child no longer 
 rest,
Drinking joy as it were milk upon his breast.

Through light-obliterating garden foliage what magic drum?
Down limb and breast or down that glimmering belly move 
 his mouth and sinewy tongue.
What from the forest came? What beast has licked its young?

VIII. Whence had they come?

Eternity is passion, girl or boy
Cry at the onset of their sexual joy
'For ever and for ever'; then awake
Ignorant what Dramatis personae spake;
A passion-driven exultant man sings out
Sentences that he has never thought;
The Flagellant lashes those submissive loins
Ignorant what that dramatist enjoins,
What master made the lash. Whence had they come,
The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?
What sacred drama through her body heaved
When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?

IX. The Four Ages of Man

He with body waged a fight,
But body won; it walks upright.

Then he struggled with the heart;
Innocence and peace depart.

Then he struggled with the mind;
His proud heart he left behind.

Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.

X. Conjunctions

If Jupiter and Saturn meet,
What a cop of mummy wheat!

The sword's a cross; thereon He died:
On breast of Mars the goddess sighed.

XI. A Needle's Eye

All the stream that's roaring by
Came out of a needle's eye;
Things unborn, things that are gone,
From needle's eye still goad it on.

XII. Meru

Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a mle, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!
Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest,
Caverned in night under the drifted snow,
Or where that snow and winter's dreadful blast
Beat down upon their naked bodies, know
That day brings round the night, that before dawn
His glory and his monuments are gone.

 A dear old couple my grandparents were, 
And kind to all dumb things; they saw in Heaven 
The lamb that Jesus petted when a child; 
Their faith was never draped by Doubt: to them 
Death was a rainbow in Eternity, 
That promised everlasting brightness soon. 
An old seafaring man was he; a rough 
Old man, but kind; and hairy, like the nut 
Full of sweet milk. All day on shore he watched 
The winds for sailors' wives, and told what ships 
Enjoyed fair weather, and what ships had storms; 
He watched the sky, and he could tell for sure 
What afternoons would follow stormy morns, 
If quiet nights would end wild afternoons. 
He leapt away from scandal with a roar, 
And if a whisper still possessed his mind, 
He walked about and cursed it for a plague. 
He took offence at Heaven when beggars passed, 
And sternly called them back to give them help. 
In this old captain's house I lived, and things 
That house contained were in ships' cabins once: 
Sea-shells and charts and pebbles, model ships; 
Green weeds, dried fishes stuffed, and coral stalks; 
Old wooden trunks with handles of spliced rope, 
With copper saucers full of monies strange, 
That seemed the savings of dead men, not touched 
To keep them warm since their real owners died; 
Strings of red beads, methought were dipped in blood, 
And swinging lamps, as though the house might move; 
An ivory lighthouse built on ivory rocks, 
The bones of fishes and three bottled ships. 
And many a thing was there which sailors make 
In idle hours, when on long voyages, 
Of marvellous patience, to no lovely end. 
And on those charts I saw the small black dots 
That were called islands, and I knew they had 
Turtles and palms, and pirates' buried gold. 
There came a stranger to my granddad's house, 
The old man's nephew, a seafarer too; 
A big, strong able man who could have walked 
Twm Barlum's hill all clad in iron mail 
So strong he could have made one man his club 
To knock down others -- Henry was his name, 
No other name was uttered by his kin. 
And here he was, sooth illclad, but oh, 
Thought I, what secrets of the sea are his! 
This man knows coral islands in the sea, 
And dusky girls heartbroken for white men; 
More rich than Spain, when the Phoenicians shipped 
Silver for common ballast, and they saw 
Horses at silver mangers eating grain; 
This man has seen the wind blow up a mermaid's hair 
Which, like a golden serpent, reared and stretched 
To feel the air away beyond her head. 
He begged my pennies, which I gave with joy -- 
He will most certainly return some time 
A self-made king of some new land, and rich. 
Alas that he, the hero of my dreams, 
Should be his people's scorn; for they had rose 
To proud command of ships, whilst he had toiled 
Before the mast for years, and well content; 
Him they despised, and only Death could bring 
A likeness in his face to show like them. 
For he drank all his pay, nor went to sea 
As long as ale was easy got on shore. 
Now, in his last long voyage he had sailed 
From Plymouth Sound to where sweet odours fan 
The Cingalese at work, and then back home -- 
But came not near my kin till pay was spent. 
He was not old, yet seemed so; for his face 
Looked like the drowned man's in the morgue, when it 
Has struck the wooden wharves and keels of ships. 
And all his flesh was pricked with Indian ink, 
His body marked as rare and delicate 
As dead men struck by lightning under trees 
And pictured with fine twigs and curlèd ferns; 
Chains on his neck and anchors on his arms; 
Rings on his fingers, bracelets on his wrist; 
And on his breast the Jane of Appledore 
Was schooner rigged, and in full sail at sea. 
He could not whisper with his strong hoarse voice, 
No more than could a horse creep quietly; 
He laughed to scorn the men that muffled close 
For fear of wind, till all their neck was hid, 
Like Indian corn wrapped up in long green leaves; 
He knew no flowers but seaweeds brown and green, 
He knew no birds but those that followed ships. 
Full well he knew the water-world; he heard 
A grander music there than we on land, 
When organ shakes a church; swore he would make 
The sea his home, though it was always roused 
By such wild storms as never leave Cape Horn; 
Happy to hear the tempest grunt and squeal 
Like pigs heard dying in a slaughterhouse. 
A true-born mariner, and this his hope -- 
His coffin would be what his cradle was, 
A boat to drown in and be sunk at sea; 
Salted and iced in Neptune's larder deep. 
This man despised small coasters, fishing-smacks; 
He scorned those sailors who at night and morn 
Can see the coast, when in their little boats 
They go a six days' voyage and are back 
Home with their wives for every Sabbath day. 
Much did he talk of tankards of old beer, 
And bottled stuff he drank in other lands, 
Which was a liquid fire like Hell to gulp, 
But Paradise to sip. 

And so he talked; 
Nor did those people listen with more awe 
To Lazurus -- whom they had seen stone dead -- 
Than did we urchins to that seaman's voice. 
He many a tale of wonder told: of where, 
At Argostoli, Cephalonia's sea 
Ran over the earth's lip in heavy floods; 
And then again of how the strange Chinese 
Conversed much as our homely Blackbirds sing. 
He told us how he sailed in one old ship 
Near that volcano Martinique, whose power 
Shook like dry leaves the whole Caribbean seas; 
And made the sun set in a sea of fire 
Which only half was his; and dust was thick 
On deck, and stones were pelted at the mast. 
Into my greedy ears such words that sleep 
Stood at my pillow half the night perplexed. 
He told how isles sprang up and sank again, 
Between short voyages, to his amaze; 
How they did come and go, and cheated charts; 
Told how a crew was cursed when one man killed 
A bird that perched upon a moving barque; 
And how the sea's sharp needles, firm and strong, 
Ripped open the bellies of big, iron ships; 
Of mighty icebergs in the Northern seas, 
That haunt the far hirizon like white ghosts. 
He told of waves that lift a ship so high 
That birds could pass from starboard unto port 
Under her dripping keel. 

Oh, it was sweet 
To hear that seaman tell such wondrous tales: 
How deep the sea in parts, that drownèd men 
Must go a long way to their graves and sink 
Day after day, and wander with the tides. 
He spake of his own deeds; of how he sailed 
One summer's night along the Bosphorus, 
And he -- who knew no music like the wash 
Of waves against a ship, or wind in shrouds -- 
Heard then the music on that woody shore 
Of nightingales,and feared to leave the deck, 
He thought 'twas sailing into Paradise. 
To hear these stories all we urchins placed 
Our pennies in that seaman's ready hand; 
Until one morn he signed on for a long cruise, 
And sailed away -- we never saw him more. 
Could such a man sink in the sea unknown? 
Nay, he had found a land with something rich, 
That kept his eyes turned inland for his life. 
'A damn bad sailor and a landshark too, 
No good in port or out' -- my granddad said.

I am at the entrance to a tunnel
These phrases drill through time.
Perhaps I am that which waits at the end of the tunnel.
I speak with eyes closed.
                         Someone
has planted
           a forest of magnetic needles
in my eyelids,
                  someone
guides the thread of these words.
                                    The page
has become an ants’ nest.
                           The void
has settled at the pit of my stomach.
                                       I fall
endlessly through that void.
                              I fall without falling.
My hands are cold,
                    my feet cold –
but the alphabets are burning, burning.
                                         Space
makes and unmakes itself.
                           The night insists,
the night touches my forehead,
                                touches my thoughts.
What does it want?

 1918
This is the State above the Law.
 The State exists for the State alone."
[This is a gland at the back of the jaw,
 And an answering lump by the collar-bone.],


Some die shouting in gas or fire;
 Some die silent, by shell and shot.
Some die desperate, caught on the wire -
 Some die suddenly. This will not.


"Regis suprema voluntas Lex"
[It will follow the regular course of--throats.]
Some die pinned by the broken decks,
 Some die sobbing between the boats.


Some die eloquent, pressed to death
 By the sliding trench as their friends can hear
Some die wholly in half a breath.
 Some--give trouble for half a year.


"There is neither Evil nor Good in life
 Except as the needs of the State ordain."
[Since it is rather too late for the knife,
 All we can do is to mask the pain.]


Some die saintly in faith and hope--
 One died thus in a prison-yard--
Some die broken by rape or the rope;
 Some die easily. This dies hard.


"I will dash to pieces who bar my way.
 Woe to the traitor! Woe to the weak! "
[Let him write what he wishes to say.
 It tires him out if he tries to speak.]

Some die quietly. Some abound
 In loud self-pity. Others spread
Bad morale through the cots around .
 This is a type that is better dead.


"The war was forced on me by my foes.
 All that I sought was the right to live."
[Don't be afraid of a triple dose;
 The pain will neutralize all we give.


Here are the needles. See that he dies
 While the effects of the drug endure. . . .
What is the question he asks with his eyes?--
 Yes, All-Highest, to God, be sure.]

Along the route of this river,
with a little luck, we shall chance upon
our brothers' fortune, hidden with that cold smile
reserved for discreet bankers unmindful of the hydra
growing fiery mornings from our discontent
Wealth was always fashionable, telluric,
not honor pristine and profound.
In blasphemous glee, they raise to God's lips
those cups filled with ethnic offerings
that saps the blood of all human good.
Having no other country to call my own
except for this one full of pine needles
on which we nail our children's lives,
I have put off examining this skull,
savage harvest, the swollen earth,
until that day when, all God's children,
we shall plant a eureka supported by a blood knot.
And remorse not being theirs to feel,
I offer an inventory of abuse by these men,
with this wretched earth on my palms,
so as to remind them of our stilted growth
the length of a cutlass, or if you prefer
the size of our burnt-out brotherhood.