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Heavens and Earth

Chapter 52: WATCHMEN
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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.

WATCHMEN

Six of us were your guards, slayers of fear,
Humor, the parti-colored, juggling knives,
Rhyme with a sonnet train of elfin wives,
Friendship, as solid-indolent as beer;
Love with his harp you thought a trifle queer,
But most amusing—if he walked in gyves.
Trust and myself made pillows of our lives.
And so you bore with us for quite a year.
You wearied. Humor twinkled to a star.
Rhyme turned a broker and began to add.
I’m sure that Friendship went entirely mad;
And Love crept stalely drunk from bar to bar.
Only remained the bald old dog, blind Trust
And I—and we shall growl till both are dust.