Poemas

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
Mymother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With apalm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

Theodore Roethke

For My Daughter
by Weldon Kees
Looking into my daughter’s eyes I read   
Beneath theinnocence of morning flesh   
Concealed, hintings of death she does not heed.
Coldest of winds have blown this hair, and mesh
Of seaweed snarled these miniatures of hands;
The night’s slow poison,tolerant and bland,
Has moved her blood. Parched years that I have seen   
That may be hers appear: foul, lingering   
Death in certain war, the slim legs green.   
Or, fed on hate, she relishes thesting   
Of others’ agony; perhaps the cruel   
Bride of a syphilitic or a fool.   
These speculations sour in the sun.   
I have no daughter. I desire none.

A Far Cry from Africa

A wind isruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa, Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste nocompassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?
Threshedout by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilizations dawn
>From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast isread
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still...