Coda
O my songs,
Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into people's faces,
Will you find your lost dead among them?
This poem is in the public domain.
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A Pact
I make truce with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root—
Let there be commerce between us.
1913
Canto V
Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus;
Ecbatan, the block ticks and fades out;
The bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan,
City of patterned streets; again the vision:
Down in the viae stradae, toga’d the crowd, and arm’d
Rushing on populous buriness, and from parapets
Looked down—at North
Was Egypt, and the celestial Nile, blue-deep
cutting low barren lands,
Old men and camels working the water-wheels;
Measureless seas and stars,
Iamblichus’ light, the souls ascending,
Sparks like a partridge covey,
Like the “ciocco,” brand struck Ts'ai Chi'h
The petals fall in the fountain,
the orange coloured rose-leaves,
Their ochre clings to the stone.
2017