See the crazy gate
Or crazy house atilt, terraced with air
Where solid wall once stood, cliff-dwellers’ home.
Or here a man,
A soldier once, night-watching out the day,
Life’s blinders are put on him young.
He sells
Pencils, we turn away; the penny price
Is too great for this side-show of a world;
Pity, a flea-bite, fades.
A witches’ brew
May have reduced all to a crazy-quilt,
A patchwork satire on the grace of man,
So limber in the grace of God
He, mountebank animal, makes his cities silt
Overnight. The eye of newt, bull’s ear,
Blood of an infant born within wedlock,
Alchemy’s golden key, the soldiers’ cube
Of sustenance, all these have wreaked a spell
All the old women mumble endlessly.
Whether we brood or work or sit
Vacant and staring, all the cold March winds
Blow through the defenceless houses, over the limp
Flags of laundry hung from the ruins,
Upon the helpless old, for all are old,
Freezing them in its icy tourniquet.
But yet through all, hate grows, builds up to tower
A flaming Lucifer higher than the spires
Of the dark drugged cathedrals;
He bends down
In triumph over the wreckage of the town.
The Heart of Europe
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