Ode To Our Young Pro-Consuls Of The Air

To St. John Perse

Once more the country calls

From sleep, as from his doom,

Each citizen to take

His modest stake

Where the sky falls

With a Pacific boom.

Warm winds in even climes

Push southward angry bees

As we, with tank and plane,

Wrest land and main

From yellow mimes,

The puny Japanese.

Boys hide in lunging cubes

Crouching to explode,

Beyond Atlantic skies,

With cheerful cries

Their barking tubes

Upon the German toad.

Marvelling day by day

Upon the human kind

What might I have

(A poet alone)

To balk or slay

These enemies of mind?

I sought by night to foal

Chimeras into men-

Decadence of power

That, at late hour,

Untimed the soul

To live the past again:

Toy sword, three-cornered hat

At York and Lexington-

While Bon-Homme whipped at sea

This enemy

Whose roar went flat

After George made him run;

Toy rifle, leather hat

Above the boyish beard

And in that Blue renown

The Gray went down,

Down like a rat,

And even the rats cheered.

In a much later age

(Europe had been in flames)

Proud Wilson yielded ground

To franc and pound,

Made pilgrimage

In the wake of Henry James.

Where Lou Quatorze held fete

For sixty thousand men,

France took the German sword

But later, bored,

Opened the gate

To Hitler at Compiegne.

In this bad time no part

The poet took, nor chance:

He studied Swift and Donne,

Ignored the Hun,

While with faint heart

Proust caused the fall of France.

Sad day at Oahu

When the Jap beetle hitl

Our Proustian retort

Was Kimmel and Short,

Old women in blue,

And then the beetle bit.

It was defeat, or near itl

Yet all that feeble time

Brave Brooks and lithe MacLeish

Had sworn to thresh

Our flagging spirit

With literature made Prime!

Cow Creek and bright Bear Wallow,

Nursing the blague that dulls

Spirits grown Eliotic,

Now patriotic

Are: we follow

The Irresponsibles!

Young men, Americans!

You go to win the world

With zeal pro-consular

For our whole star

You partisans

Of liberty unfurled!

O animal excellence,

Take pterodactyl flight

Fire-winged into the air

And find your lair

With cunning sense

On some Arabian bight

Or sleep your dreamless sleep

(Reptilian bomber!) by

The Mediterranean

And like a man

Swear you to keep

Faith with imperial eye:

Take off, O gentle youth,

And coasting India

Scale crusty Everest

Whose mythic crest

Resists your truth;

And spying far away

Upon the Tibetan plain

A limping caravan,

Dive, and exterminate

The Lama, late

Survival of old pain.

Go kill the dying swan.