Behold, my mates, mine starry eye,

All attention does this demand.

A fevered dream no doubt has passed.

O’er every soul it has command.

 

O wretched sun and moon that flee this world,

The landscape of this wasteland suits me not.

Water, water, nowhere to be found

Naught else swells here save death and rot.

 

The cruelest months of spring consume

The fractured mind of T.S. Eliot.

Worldly parts comingle in undulations

In dunes of copper sands and rock.

 

These sullen faces from parts unknown

Confuse the continent that was their own.

In fearful tremens and ratt’ling bones

Be this, England, or France, or Rome?

 

He speaks of death, so well acquainted,

Though he and I be both of grim relation.

O dryness! O rain! And sons of man!

All things are both object and sensation.

 

A game of chess and a silent speaker,

Festooned in ivory, marble, and polished glass.

The unctuous oils burn but shed no light

On discorded discourse, not ‘til the last.

 

Alas the river Thames he saw flowing

But no ship to bear him to solace thence.

Instead a sermon of fire and wreck

and every city was so unreal hence.

 

An old hermaphrodite and a small house clerk

And a typist at home, so lewdly played.

No shame was there to lovely folly,

No cross to bear and none dismayed.

 

Tiresias and Sybil! My unchristian kindred

Does life e’erlasting plague ye so dear?

Weary time! O weary time! Thee I ken.

And such as they, wish an end were near!

 

Death by water is what the thunder said

As the rain quenched the fetid earth.

The black clouds gathered as thunder spoke

He sat fishing, gaily, as at home and hearth.

 

Let us depart, then, from parched devastation,

Dunes at world’s end with rocks sheer cloven.

Many tongues praise a macabre fascination;

Life’s cycle revolves with our threads interwoven.

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