Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, DEAD AT ELEVEN, by JOHN E. REINECKE


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

DEAD AT ELEVEN, by                    
First Line: Make no threne!
Last Line: Soldans surround him.
Subject(s): Death; Funerals; Dead, The; Burials


Make no threne!
Soldans uphold him:
Knights bear him up and place him
Upon a roan horse with bulging muscles,
Plated round with steel, sheathed in crimson trappings.
Homeric heroes hand to hand with brandished long-spears
Battle sonorously as in their creator's lines.
The brown, suspicious folk of Polynesia, Melanesia,
Flee from Captain Cooks in cloud-winged ships,
And from their sour, sea-hardened sailors.
Indians in never-ending conflict lose their lives
As they ride concentered about crawling trains of wagons.
And the war-horns sound at Svold:
Make no threne for him; he sees
Eric and Olaf Tryggvason in epic war-shock on the close seas meeting;
Sees too Einar Tambaskjelfer, eighteen, silk-haired,
Shooting his singing arrows --
How sweet to see the roll of Olaf's Svold-fight thunder!
In warlike dance Zulus prance
Majestically, tossing assegais and tufts of hair.
The air is full of flying carpets, rukhs;
He surveys the desert spaces and the crescent-bannered citadels above jostling
bazaars;
Jinni fly to him.
Thermopylae pass is held and is forced through;
Salamis shakes from the shock and the grounding grind of the galleys;
While throughout the Grecian ranks pass the dear tangible gods.
Hercules throws down his club and approaches,
The lion-skin-clad, great, fierce, adventurous, laughing friend of a boy
With him Theseus in his robe and long hair,
Perseus the wind-cleaver and Jason one-sandalled,
The wonderfullest trio, more tangible than the football team of the high school,
Come offering adventures in strange lands never described yet or charted.
Before him are laid out the lists for a tourney
(Patterned similar to those of Ashby-la-Zouch);
And the knights issue from pennoned pavilions:
Everywhere there is ring and flash of steel armor:
All is motion and color and deeds.
Make no threne:
Soldans surround him.





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