A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

A winter thaw opens the children’s coats
And bursts the locks on schoolyard fences,
Disturbs the sluggish chucks; the stoats
Pursuing the nights on their private fancies
Are vicious with laggards, fond of a chance,
Like our children in their baffle, kiting
In dives, the wind-hovered swallows chirking
Over your crossed churchyard. Sighting
Down the barreled pencil from my campus window, hawking
The season’s limit, I see: it is all killing work.
It is all killing work. In a public opinion
Nurtured for war no sense of belonging
Possesses the children, no blessed morning minion
Will come to us now in our sullen languor,
Our sinister sense of a world gone wrong.
In the year of your death a new spring upon us
Knocked at our hearts like a long absent lover
And startled a summer of blaming whose onus
Cheapened us all with expensive discoveries.
You were deaf to all that, unmoved.
But now we have need of your wit, of some bottom to sound:
The brokers are beasting again, learned advisors are leaping
Off tall buildings at single bounds
The citizens gibber like apes over prices,
The Guard is rebelling, our lectors are bribed, every son
Of a bitch in the taverns is packing a gun,
And no one is what you called “nice.”
Still, in the midst of all this there remain some aware
Of your admirable prescience, your novel retina
Gazing backwards in time for our truths; condemned as uncaring
By unwashed village voices you would not take on a bet,
You knew we are tricked by the Joker within us. Men do
What they will before judgment, world without end
(The agon of Samson; perhaps that of Sweeney—but Agnew?)
The returns are all in. The Dove declines to descend.

Few things, you taught, can drive the driven strong
From dumbness when their rack has wrung its weak
Love letters from the broken folk who long
To beg forgiveness when the pinions squeak;
Machined and certain, bent to the assault
By others who have learned the use of screws,
The strong will mutter, when red wrongs accuse:
“The truth was twisted. It is not our fault.”
Theirs is the credo of this world’s old boys
Whom nothing forces to a man’s estate.
Knowing all that, you stated plain enough:
The State qua State will murder all our joys,
Hatred reveling in its hate.
And sphinx-like now, you leave us to our suffering.