Sapokanikan

official lyrics from Divers

The cause is Ozymandian.
The map of Sapokanikan
is sanded and beveled,
the land lone and leveled
by some unrecorded and powerful hand
which plays along the monument,
and drums, upon a plastic bag,
The Brave Men and Women, So Dear to God
and Famous For All of the Ages rag.

(Sing: Do you love me?
Will you remember?
The snow falls above me.
The Renderer, renders.
The Event is in the hand of God.)

Beneath a Patch of Grass,
her bones the old Dutch master hid,
while, elsewhere, Tobias and the Angel disguised
what the scholars surmised was a mother and kid
(interred with other daughters, in dirt, in other potter's fields).
Above them,
parades mark the passing of days
through parks where pale colonnades arch
in marble and steel,
where all of the Twenty Thousand attending your foot fall
(and the Cause that they died for)
are lost in the idling birdcalls,
and the records they left are cryptic at best,
lost in obsolescence:

the text will not yield
(nor X-ray reveal, with any fluorescence)
where the Hand of the Master begins and ends.

I fell.
I tried to do well, but I won't be.
Will you tell the one that I loved
to remember, and hold me?
I call and call for the doctor,
but the snow swallows me whole,
with old Florry Walker.

The event lives only in print.

***

He said,
"It's alright, and it's all over now," and boarded the plane,
his belt unfastened,
(The boy was known to show unusual daring—
and called a 'boy', this alderman
confounding Tammany Hall, in whose employ
King Tamanend himself preceded John’s fall!)

So we all raise a standard
to which the wise and honest soul may repair;
to which a hunter,
a hundred years from now,
may look, and despair, and see with wonder
the tributes we have left to rust in the park:
swearing that our hair stood on end,
to see John Purroy Mitchel depart for the Western Front,
where work might count.
All exeunt! All go out!
Await the hunter, to decipher the stone
(and what lies under, now).
The city is gone.
Look, and despair.
Look, and despair.

Notes

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