"The Repture" (Pessoa IV.)

Gather leaves like chirg Lönnrot,
story all the pungent dead.
Green tea & a precise thought
ash-floats, on the glory fled.
Wear yet our broken beauty
legends coil in readiness;
where swerving is a duty
so's harrowing deathlessness.
Tweak a tune from the bent saw
nightly. If they fell, what blame
outlasts the foundation flaw
in lands those, only in name?
A ghost dance, for what will be
that's swathed now in secrecy.


"Dallas was not, of course, deep South, but it was deeper than one might suppose. Early in the 1920s when I was about five or six years old, the Ku Klux Klan had a mammoth night parade there. My father, mother, sister, brother, and I saw it from my father's office on the fifth floor of a building on Main Street in the center of town. ...It frightened me to look down from such a height. I saw hundreds of sheeted figures and the fiery torches which many of them carried. I am sure that I had not the remotest notion of the meaning of the parade." --Thomas F Gossett, in new (1997) introduction to Race: the History of an Idea in America (1963)


"… And though I had slain a thousand foes less one,
The thousandth knife had found my liver;
The thousandth enemy said to me

'Now you shall die, and none shall know.'

And the fool looking down believed this,
Not seeing, above his shoulder,
the naked stars,

Each one remembering." --The Naked Stars