i remember the poem, but thanks, i think i first came across it in HE
Jacobs' Six Thousand Years of Bread, probably the most affecting book on
bread written
it's a grass-metaphor poem of a kind taken up maybe in a subtler way by
Celan, 'grass written asunder'
Edmund
American contemporary of Eliot, greatly esteemed then but not so much
now, is Carl Sandburg, who wrote in 1918
Grass
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work -
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
It was one of his best-known poems.
Mark
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