27.
Where is the humanity? Our dispassionate chroniclers,
Our Boswells of the Air, they are very nearly
Pressing GameBoy buttons; the Outrage is outrageously
Wrong
The feelings are falling in the pathetic detritus
Of
27α.
Irving Berlin sung with joined elbows
In Palestine the dance is antic, peppered with shot
And laughter against the ugly melted pottage of America.
27β.
Through a monocle, through the slim thin forks
Now ash, now spent gas and scotched final
Scorching the plains and
27γ.
How little we all are, in one sense, how frail
These massive structures fall without a quail.
Their tin is tin, their spanning still is tensile
But thumbs that formed their shape are yet prehensile.
28.
The fear impounded stealthily, the mass of
Flattening
Flattening the world.
My God, the effort, pushed through cinctures of blood,
To round the earth out, puff its center up,
Shape the arc of water under air
And mold the curves of all 4 compass points,
And travel east as though upon a wheel,
To touch tomorrow's hour like a seam,
And launch this spheroid high in coldest night
Around a warm and loving sun. How sharp
A fuze it took to flatten out the earth,
And swash its history in bites and chunks
To fill the urn of pain up to the lips
And shave the edges down with burrbuffed welds
Smooth now, for the stripped down life in the pits
Of the jettisoned, the stretched, the shredded fill.
