Poem
- Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!
- It isn't fit for humans now,
- There isn't grass to graze a cow.
- Swarm over, Death!
- Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
- Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
- Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
- Tinned minds, tinned breath.
- Mess up the mess they call a town -
- A house for ninety-seven down
- And once a week a half a crown
- For twenty years,
- And get that man with double chin
- Who'll always cheat and always win,
- Who washes his repulsive skin
- In women's tears,
- And smash his desk of polished oak
- And smash his hands so used to stroke
- And stop his boring dirty joke
- And make him yell.
- But spare the bald young clerks who add
- The profits of the stinking cad;
- It's not their fault that they are mad,
- They've tasted Hell.
- It's not their fault they do not know
- The birdsong from the radio,
- It's not their fault they often go
- To Maidenhead
- And talk of sport and makes of cars
- In various bogus-Tudor bars
- And daren't look up and see the stars
- But belch instead.
- In labour-saving homes, with care
- Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
- And dry it in synthetic air
- And paint their nails.
- Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
- To get it ready for the plough.
- The cabbages are coming now;
- The earth exhales.
Read more about this topic: Slough (poem)
Famous quotes containing the word poem:
“A poem should not mean
But be.”
—Archibald MacLeish (18921982)
“Every poem of value must have a residue [of language].... It cannot be exhausted because our lives are not long enough to do so. Indeed, in the greatest poetry, the residue may seem to increase as our experience increasesthat is, as we become more sensitive to the particular ignitions in its language. We return to a poem not because of its symbolic [or sociological] value, but because of the waste, or subversion, or difficulty, or consolation of its provision.”
—William Logan, U.S. educator. Condition of the Individual Talent, The Sewanee Review, p. 93, Winter 1994.
“The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?”
—Paul Celan [Paul Antschel] (19201970)