Killers

I am singing to you

Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;

Hard as a man in handcuffs,

Held where he cannot move:

    Under the sun

Are sixteen million men,

Chosen for shining teeth,

Sharp eyes, hard legs,

And a running of young warm blood in their wrists.

    And a red juice runs on the green grass;

And a red juice soaks the dark soil.

And the sixteen million are killing. . . and killing

         and killing.

    I never forget them day or night:

They beat on my head for memory of them;

They pound on my heart and I cry back to them,

To their homes and women, dreams and games.

    I wake in the night and smell the trenches,

And hear the low stir of sleepers in lines—

Sixteen million sleepers and pickets in the dark:

Some of them long sleepers for always,

Some of them tumbling to sleep to-morrow for always,

Fixed in the drag of the world's heartbreak,

Eating and drinking, toiling. . . on a long job of

         killing.

Sixteen million men.