Classic Poem

Unhappy country, what
wings you have, what eyes
of jellied fire, what claws
for cratering farmlands and the straw
slums of the East. Your enemies
are burning and their harvests rot;

your friends are burning and
their harvests rot. Your screams
across the world's airwaves
of Peace Peace mock their rubble graves.
Unhappy eagle, crest that gleams
among the stars, and chicken mind—

when feathers of steel moult
and over the dead paddy
dead silence supervenes,
O weep, for the world-darkening means,
the ridiculous reasons, and the bloody
and shabby pathos of the result.











By permission of the author.