You Give Me The Feeling

We Read Our Mail And Counted Up Our Missions In Bombers Named For Girls, We Burned The Cities We Had Learned About In School Till Our Lives Wore Out; Our Bodies Lay Among The People We Had Killed And Never Seen. When We Lasted Long Enough They Gave Us Medals; When We Died They Said, "our Casualties Were Low." They Said, "here Are The Maps"; We Burned The Cities.

Most Poets, Most Good Poets Even, No Longer Have The Heart To Write About What Is Most Terrible In The World Of The Present: The Bombs Waiting Beside The Rockets, The Hundreds Of Millions Staring Into The Temporary Shelter Of Their Television Sets, The Decline Of The West That Seems Less A Decline Than The Fall Preceding An Explosion.

A Person Is A Process, One That Leads To Death.

If You've Been Put In Your Place Long Enough You Begin To Act Like The Place.

Both In Verse And In Prose [karl] Shapiro Loves, Partly Out Of Indignation And Partly Out Of Sheer Mischievousness, To Tell The Naked Truths Or Half-truths Or Quarter-truths That Will Make Anybody's Hair Stand On End; He Is Always Crying: "but He Hasn't Any Clothes On!" About An Emperor Who Is Half The Time Surprisingly Well-dressed.