Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SOMETHING IS DYING HERE, by THOMAS MCGRATH


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SOMETHING IS DYING HERE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: In a hundred places in north dakota
Last Line: The poison of their own sweet country has brought them here
Subject(s): Economics; Poverty; Socialism


In a hundred places in North Dakota
Tame locomotives are sleeping
Inside the barricades of bourgeois flowers:
Zinnias, petunias, johnny-jump-ups --
Their once wild fur warming the public squares.

Something is dying here.
And perhaps I, too --
My brain already full of the cloudy lignite of eternity . . .

I invoke an image of my strength.
Nothing will come.
Oh -- a homing lion perhaps
made entirely of tame bees;
Or the chalice of an old storage battery, loaded
With the rancid electricity of the nineteen thirties
Cloud harps iconographic blood
Rusting in the burnt church of my flesh . . .

But nothing goes forward:
The locomotive never strays out of the flower corral
The mustang is inventing barbwire the bulls
Have put rings in their noses . . .

The dead here
Will leave behind a ring of autobodies,
Weather-eaten bones of cars where the stand-off failed --

Strangers: go tell among the Companions:
These dead weren't put down by Cheyennes or Red Chinese:
The poison of their own sweet country has brought them here.


Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA
98368-0271, www.cc.press.org




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