Bill Knott

Here you will find thePoem(End) of Summer (1966)of poet Bill Knott

(End) of Summer (1966)

I'm tired of murdering children. Once, long ago today, they wanted to live; now I feel Vietnam the place where rigor mortis is beginning to set-in upon me. I force silence down the throats of mutes, down the throats of mating-cries of animals who know they are extinct. The chameleon's death-soliloquy is your voice's pulse; your scorched forehead a constellation's suicide-note. A phonograph needle plunges through long black hair, and stone drips slowly into our veins. The earth has been squandered by the meek. And upsidedown in the earth a dead man walks upon my soles when I walk A baby is crying. In the swaddling-pages a baby. 'Don't cry. No Solomori's-sword can divide you from the sky. You are one. Fly.' I'm tired, so tired. I have sleep to do. I have work to dream.