American Anaesthetics
by Jonathan Holden
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At [...]
Now you’ll sing a song of liberty for blacks and paks and jocks
And they’ll take you from this dump you’re in and stick you in a box
Then they’ll take you to cloughprior and shove you in the ground
But you’ll stick your head back out and shout we’ll have another round
At the graveside of Cúchulainn we’ll [...]
Robert Graves (1895–1985). Fairies and Fusiliers. 1918.
A PURPLE whale
Proudly sweeps his tail
Towards Nineveh;
Glassy green
Surges between
A mile of roaring sea.
:click:
Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel;
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter, and confounds him there;
Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o’er-snowed and bareness every where:
Then were not summer’s [...]
Down the street was a dog. Some mut spaniel, black and white.One dog, Garrett and two friends, stud looking, came downthe street to the house, to me.Again.Down the street was a dog. Some mut spaniel, black and white.One dog, Garrett and two friends came down the street to thehouse, to me.Garrett takes [...]
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the [...]
Hedylus 280 bc
Let Us Drink (He 5)
Let us drink, then
And
perhaps we’ll find
something new
in our wine -some eloquent, honey-coloured word.
So come!
Fill me up with jugs of Chian wine and say,”Go ahead, Hedylus, play!
”I hate an empty life-empty of wine.”
Music
