Sapokanikan

The cause is Ozymandian.

The map of Sapokanikan

is sanded and bevelled,

the land lone and leveled

by some unrecorded and powerful hand

which plays along the monument

and drums upon a plastic bag.

The "Brave Men and Women So Dear to God

and Famous to All of the Ages" rag.

Sang:

"Do you love me?

Will you remember?"

The snow falls above me.

The renderer renders:

"The event is in the hand of God".

Beneath a patch of grass, her

bones the old Dutch master hid.

While elsewhere Tobias

and the angel disguise

what the scholars surmise was a mother and kid.

Interred with other daughters,

in dirt in other potters' fields

above them, parades

mark the passing of days

through parks where pale colonnades arch in marble and steel,

where all of the twenty-thousand attending your foot fall

and the cause that they died for are lost in the idling bird calls,

and the records they left are cryptic at best,

lost in obsolescence.

The text will not yield, nor x-ray reveal

with any fluorescence

where the hand of the master begins and ends.

I fell, I tried to do well but I won't be.

Will you tell the one that I love to remember and hold me?

I call and call for the doctor

but the snow swallows me whole with ol' Florry Walker

and the event lives only in print.

He said:

"It's alright,"

and "It's all over now,"

and boarded the plane,

his belt unfastened;

the boy was known to show unusual daring.

And, called a “boy”,

this alderman, confounding Tammany Hall,

In whose employ King Tamanend himself preceded John’s fall.

So we all raise a standard

to which the wise and honest soul may repair,

to which a hunter,

a hundred years from now, may look and despair

and see with wonder

the tributes we have left to rust in the parks,

swearing that our hair stood on end

to see John Purroy Mitchel depart

for the Western front where our work might count.

All exeunt, all go out,

await the hunter to decipher the stone,

and what lies under.

Now the city is gone.

Look and despair.

Look and despair.