To Ezra Pound

Were you to have seen the ovens
your hard tongue would have burned to ash,
you devil, lecturing covens
as the fulgurous blitzkriegs flash.
Across your adopted homeland
you exulted while others warred,
having no honor, a Roman
who would not fall upon his sword,
even after his unjust wrath
had been thwarted by apt measure
like Commodus slain in his bath,
a tyrant cleaved to his pleasure.
What good songs you sang are lost,
deafened by your erudite cries
of hatred, bigotry—mind lost
in rooms padded with your own lies.
The lunatics sang behind you,
electroshock troopers plugged in,
the asylum leader in view,
his thunderclap voice a loud din
that quickened Europe’s stagnant blood
and swept you across the ocean,
your own heart racing forth, aflood
with a Modernist’s crass notion
about “betterment”, “perfection”,
Aryan teleologies,
the irony of your lection
being bad Aristophanes.
Eliot, Yeats, Woolf, and others
embosomed you with their regard,
sympathetic to such brothers
who despised those whom were ill-Starred
and though I might forgive them such
as was wont in that insane age,
you, villain, were not half so much
repentant on your prideful stage.
Some claim you recanted your songs
so thunderous with cannon force,
but even if true, how can wrongs,
once done, not continue their course?
They are as birds within a cage
set free, their talons stretched apart
to clutch the world with a sharp rage;
thunderbolts thrown into the heart.
You cannot outrace the echoes
that fly away from bygone words,
no more than may a weed beck those
seeds carried far by passing birds,
or passing storms, or fell ages,
the seeds sprouting roots and shoots far
and blooming fast, necrophages
of blood and soil spilled from a Star.