Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns . . . tell me if the lovers are losers . . . tell me if any get more than the lovers . . . in the dust . . . in the cool tombs.

Old Osawatomie

John Brown’s body under the morning stars.

Six feet of dust under the morning stars.

And a panorama of war performs itself

Over the six-foot stage of circling armies.

Room for Gettysburg, Wilderness, Chickamauga,

On a six-foot stage of dust.

Hats

Hats, where do you belong?

what is under you?

On the rim of a skyscraper’s forehead

I looked down and saw: hats: fifty thousand hats:

Swarming with a noise of bees and sheep, cattle and waterfalls,

Stopping with a silence of sea grass, a silence of prairie corn.

Hats: tell me your high hopes.

Accomplished Facts

Every year Emily Dickinson sent one friend

the first arbutus bud in her garden.

In a last will and testament Andrew Jackson

remembered a friend with the gift of George

Washington’s pocket spy-glass.

Napoleon too, in a last testament, mentioned a silver

watch taken from the bedroom of Frederick the Great,

and passed along this trophy to a particular friend.

O. Henry took a blood carnation from his coat lapel

and handed it to a country girl starting work in a

bean bazaar, and scribbled: “Peach blossoms may or

may not stay pink in city dust.”

So it goes. Some things we buy, some not.

Tom Jefferson was proud of his radishes, and Abe

Lincoln blacked his own boots, and Bismarck called

Berlin a wilderness of brick and newspapers.

So it goes. There are accomplished facts.

Ride, ride, ride on in the great new blimps—

Cross unheard-of oceans, circle the planet.

When you come back we may sit by five hollyhocks.

We might listen to boys fighting for marbles.

The grasshopper will look good to us.

So it goes . . .

Buffalo Dusk

The buffaloes are gone.

And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.

Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads down pawing on in a great pageant of dusk,

Those who saw the buffaloes are gone.

And the buffaloes are gone.

The Abracadabra Boys

The abracadabra boys—have they been in the stacks and cloisters? Have they picked up languages for throwing into chow mein poems?

Have they been to a sea of jargons and brought back jargons? Their salutations go: Who cometh? and, It ith I cometh.

They know postures from impostures, pistils from pustules, to hear them tell it. They foregather and make pitty pat with each other in Latin and in their private pig Latin, very ofay.

They give with passwords. “Who cometh?” “A kumquat cometh.” “And how cometh the kumquat?” “On an abbadabba, ancient and honorable sire, ever and ever on an abbadabba.”

Do they have fun? Sure—their fun is being what they are, like our fun is being what we are—only they are more sorry for us being what we are than we are for them being what they are.