Thursday, September 22, 2022

1104. The Sabbath - W. H. Auden

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Waking on the Seventh Day of Creation,

They cautiously sniffed the air:

The most fastidious nostril among them admitted

That fellow was no longer there.


Herbivore, parasite, predator scouted,

Migrants flew fast and far-

Not a trace of his presence: holes in the earth,

Beaches covered with tar,


Ruins and metallic rubbish in plenty

Were all that was left of him

Whose birth on the sixth had made of that day

 An unnecessary interim.


Well, that fellow had never really smelled

Like a creature who would survive:

No grace, address of faculty like those

Born on the First Five.


Back, then, at last on a natural economy,

Now His Impudence was gone,

Looking exactly like what it was,

The Seventh Day went on,


Beautiful, happy, perfectly pointless….

A rifles’s ringing crack

Split their Arcadia wide open, cut

Their Sabbath nonsense short.


For whom did they think they had been created?

That fellow was back,

More bloody-minded than they remembered,

More godlike than they thought.

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