Heavens and Earth

Chapter 36: DEVOURER OF NATIONS

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About This Book

The collection assembles varied lyric and narrative poems that range from reworkings of classical myths to sharp urban vignettes and satirical sketches of modern life. Several longer pieces retell mythic episodes with vivid, imagistic language, while other poems observe city streets, public figures, and personal loss with concise reportage and elegiac restraint. Recurring concerns include desire, mortality, war, and social disorder, framed by a tension between heroic past and everyday present and rendered through formal experimentation and dramatic monologue.

DEVOURER OF NATIONS

“Strength shall be thrust to the Eater,
And down to the Strong One, sweet.”
Was ever a proverb neater,
A phrasing more apt, or meeter,
To fix on our Course-Completer
As we end Life’s beat?

You’ll decorate quite the scarlet
And secret hall of his tongue—
With your clasped hands marble and chilly,
And your face like a frozen lily—
For Death is a luscious varlet,
And likes maids young!

So there’s the end of it, Nelly!
Of you and your purple hat!
And I, your impotent Shelley,
With czars and pariahs smelly,
Shall tapestry well his belly,
That gray, round Rat!