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 | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...LONE DOG by IRENE RUTHERFORD MCLEOD IN MEMORIAM A.H.H.: 78 by ALFRED TENNYSON TO AN ISLE IN THE WATER by WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF PEG NICHOLSON by ROBERT BURNS SONGS OF THE SEA CHILDREN: 83 by BLISS CARMAN TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 3. CHRISTMAS EVE by EDWARD CARPENTER |