Author: John Barnes

Cites

• Karl Shapiro (1)
  • IN: Daybreak Zero (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: snuffle and sniff and handkerchief The doctor punched my vein The captain called me Cain Upon my belly sat the sow of fear With coins on either eye The President came by And whispered to the braid what none could hear High over where the storm Stood steadfast cruciform The golden eagle sank in wounded wheels White Negroes laughing still Crept fiercely on Brazil Turning the navies upward on their keels Now one by one the trees Stripped to their naked knees And danced upon the heaps of shrunken dead The roof of England fell Great Paris tolled her bell And China staunched her milk and wept for bread No island singly lay But lost its name that day The Ainu dived across the plunging sands From dawn to dawn to dawn King George’s birds came on Strafing the tulips from his children’s hands Thus in the classic sea Southeast from Thessaly The dynamited mermen washed ashore And tritons dressed in steel Trolled heads with rod and reel And dredged potatoes from the Aegean floor Hot is the sky and green Where Germans have been seen The moon leaks metal on the Atlantic fields Pink boys in birthday shrouds Loop lightly through the clouds Or coast the peaks of Finland on their shields That prophet year by year Lay still but could not hear Where scholars tapped to find his new remains Gog and Magog ate pork In vertical New York And war began next Wednesday on the Danes.
    FROM: "Scyros", (1941), Poem, US