Oh America
The sun sets in you.
Are you the grave of our day?
Shall I come to you, the open tomb of my race?
I would come, if I felt my hour had struck.
I would rather you came to me.
For that matter
Mahomet never went to any mountain
Save it had first approached him and cajoled his soul.
You have cajoled the souls of millions of us
America,
Why won’t you cajole my soul?
I wish you would.
I confess I am afraid of you.
The catastrophe of your exaggerate love,
You who never find yourself in love
But only lose yourself further, decomposing.
You who never recover from out of the orgasm of loving
Your pristine, isolate integrity, lost æons ago.
Your singleness within the universe.
You who in loving break down
And break further and further down
Your bounds of isolation,
But who never rise, resurrected, from this grave of mingling,
In a new proud singleness, America.
Your more-than-European idealism,
Like a be-aureoled bleached skeleton hovering
Its cage-ribs in the social heaven, beneficent.