KILLS HERSELF AT SEA; CROWDER IN CITY
AFTER SLACKERS
Oh old Uncle Sam
He’s got the infantree
He’s got the cavalree
He’s got artilleree
And then by God we’ll all go to Chermanee
God Help Kaiser Bill!
The Camera Eye (30)
remembering the grey crooked fingers the thick drip of blood off the canvas the bubbling when the lungcases try to breathe the muddy scraps of flesh you put in the ambulance alive and haul out dead
three of us sit in the dry cement fountain of the little garden with the pink walls in Récicourt
No there must be some way they taught us Land of the Free conscience Give me liberty or give me Well they give us death
sunny afternoon through the faint aftersick of mustardgas I smell the box the white roses and the white phlox with a crimson eye three brownandwhitestriped snails hang with infinite delicacy from a honeysucklebranch overhead up in the blue a sausageballoon grazes drowsily like a tethered cow there are drunken wasps clinging to the tooripe pears that fall and squash whenever the near guns spew their heavy shells that go off rumbling through the sky
with a whir that makes you remember walking in the woods and starting a woodcock
welltodo country people carefully built the walls and the little backhouse with the cleanscrubbed seat and the quartermoon in the door like the backhouse of an old farm at home carefully planted the garden and savored the fruit and the flowers and carefully planned this war
to hell with ’em Patrick Henry in khaki submits to shortarm inspection and puts all his pennies in a Liberty Loan or give me
arrivés shrapnel twanging its harps out of tiny powderpuff clouds invites us delicately to glory we happy watching the careful movements of the snails in the afternoon sunlight talking in low voices about
La Libre Belgique The Junius papers Areopagitica Milton went blind for freedom of speech If you hit the words Democracy will understand even the bankers and the clergymen I you we must
When three men hold together
The kingdoms are less by three
we are happy talking in low voices in the afternoon sunlight about après la guerre that our fingers our blood our lungs our flesh under the dirty khaki feldgrau bleu horizon might go on sweeten grow until we fall from the tree ripe like the tooripe pears the arrivés know and singing éclats sizzling gas shells theirs is the power and the glory
or give me death
Randolph Bourne
Randolph Bourne
came as an inhabitant of this earth
without the pleasure of choosing his dwelling or his career.
He was a hunchback, grandson of a congregational minister, born in 1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey; there he attended grammar-school and highschool.
At the age of seventeen he went to work as secretary to a Morristown businessman.
He worked his way through Columbia working in a pianola record factory in Newark, working as proofreader, pianotuner, accompanist in a vocal studio in Carnegie Hall.
At Columbia he studied with John Dewey,
got a travelling fellowship that took him to England Paris Rome Berlin Copenhagen,
wrote a book on the Gary schools.
In Europe he heard music, a great deal of Wagner and Sciabine
and bought himself a black cape.
This little sparrowlike man,
tiny twisted bit of flesh in a black cape,
always in pain and ailing,
put a pebble in his sling
and hit Goliath square in the forehead with it.
War, he wrote, is the health of the state.
Half musician, half educational theorist (weak health and being poor and twisted in body and on bad terms with his people hadn’t spoiled the world for Randolph Bourne; he was a happy man, loved die Meistersinger and playing Bach with his long hands that stretched so easily over the keys and pretty girls and good food and evenings of talk. When he was dying of pneumonia a friend brought him an eggnog; Look at the yellow, it’s beautiful, he kept saying as his life ebbed into delirium and fever. He was a happy man.) Bourne seized with feverish intensity on the ideas then going around at Columbia, he picked rosy glasses out of the turgid jumble of John Dewey’s teaching through which he saw clear and sharp
the shining capitol of reformed democracy,
Wilson’s New Freedom;
but he was too good a mathematician; he had to work the equations out;
with the result
that in the crazy spring of 1917 he began to get unpopular where his bread was buttered at the New Republic;
for New Freedom read Conscription, for Democracy, Win the War, for Reform, Safeguard the Morgan Loans
for Progress Civilization Education Service,
Buy a Liberty Bond,
Straff the Hun,
Jail the Objectors.
He resigned from The New Republic; only The Seven Arts had the nerve to publish his articles against the war. The backers of The Seven Arts took their money elsewhere; friends didn’t like to be seen with Bourne, his father wrote him begging him not to disgrace the family name. The rainbowtinted future of reformed democracy went pop like a pricked soapbubble.
The liberals scurried to Washington;
some of his friends plead with him to climb up on Schoolmaster Wilson’s sharabang; the war was great fought from the swivel chairs of Mr. Creel’s bureau in Washington.
He was cartooned, shadowed by the espionage service and the counter-espionage service; taking a walk with two girl friends at Wood’s Hole he was arrested, a trunk full of manuscript and letters was stolen from him in Connecticut. (Force to the utmost, thundered Schoolmaster Wilson)
He didn’t live to see the big circus of the Peace of Versailles or the purplish normalcy of the Ohio Gang.
Six weeks after the armistice he died planning an essay on the foundations of future radicalism in America.
If any man has a ghost
Bourne has a ghost,
a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak
hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone streets still left in downtown New York,
crying out in a shrill soundless giggle:
War is the health of the state.
Newsreel XXIII
If you dont like your Uncle Sammy
If you dont like the red white and blue
smiles of patriotic Essex County will be concentrated and recorded at Branch Brook Park, Newark, N.J., tomorrow afternoon. Bands will play while a vast throng marches happily to the rhythm of wartime anthems and airs. Mothers of the nation’s sons will be there; wives, many of them carrying babes born after their fathers sailed for the front, will occupy a place in Essex County’s graphic pageant; relatives and friends of the heroes who are carrying on the message of Freedom will file past a battery of cameras and all will smile a message recording installment no. 7 of Smiles Across the Sea. The hour for these folks to start smiling is 2:30.
MOBS PLUNDER CITIES