The poor, and the dazed, and the idiots

Are with us, they live in the casket of the sun

And the moon’s coffin, as I walk out tonight

Seeing the night wheeling their dark wheelbarrow

All about the plains of heaven,

And the stars inexorable rising.

Dark moon! Sinister tears!

Shadow of slums and of the conquering dead!

Some men have pierced the chest with a long needle

To stop their heart from beating any more;

Another put blocks of ice in his bed

So he would die, women

Have washed their hair, and hung themselves

In the long braids, one climbed

A high tree above her house

And lawn and swallowed poisonous spiders—

The time for exhortation is past. I have heard

The iron chairs scraping in asylums,

As the cold bird hunches into the winter

In the windy nights of November.

The coal miners rise from their pits

Like a flash flood,

Like a rice field disintegrating.

Now men cry when they hear stories of someone rising from the dead.