Daybreak Zero

The doctor punched my vein

The captain called me Cain

Upon my belly sat the sow of fear

With coins on either eye

The President came by

And whispered to the braid what none could hear

High over where the storm

Stood steadfast cruciform

The golden eagle sank in wounded wheels

White Negroes laughing still

Crept fiercely on Brazil

Turning the navies upward on their keels

Now one by one the trees

Stripped to their naked knees

And danced upon the heaps of shrunken dead

The roof of England fell

Great Paris tolled her bell

And China staunched her milk and wept for bread

No island singly lay

But lost its name that day

The Ainu dived across the plunging sands

From dawn to dawn to dawn

King George’s birds came on

Strafing the tulips from his children’s hands

Thus in the classic sea

Southeast from Thessaly

The dynamited mermen washed ashore

And tritons dressed in steel

Trolled heads with rod and reel

And dredged potatoes from the Aegean floor

Hot is the sky and green

Where Germans have been seen

The moon leaks metal on the Atlantic fields

Pink boys in birthday shrouds

Loop lightly through the clouds

Or coast the peaks of Finland on their shields

That prophet year by year

Lay still but could not hear

Where scholars tapped to find his new remains

Gog and Magog ate pork

In vertical New York

And war began next Wednesday on the Danes.