Apologies to Walt Whitman
In the Land of Lincoln we no longer read,
we’re dumb as the sound of the winds
that blow us toward our next suicide war.
Where the wise have gone missing, there is no
use for words, for words are the feet of reason,
meant to carriy spirit into bodies that bleed.
No war in history, nor literature, nor myth,
ever evened the score for anybody left standing,
but laid blankets of equal eternity over all the dead.
Dave Read
Please see Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, on the Poetry Foundation website. Harold Bloom regards it the Good Gray poets greatest poem, and tells us that Edith Wharton reported that Henry James was devoted to it, too.