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AN APOTHEOSIS OF HART CRANE

[first published in
THE SEED,
Chicago, Illinois,
June 1967,
Volume 1, Issue Number 4,
on page 14]

     If Hart Crane could have been an anarcho-communist, he'd be alive today.  He would probably be to North America what the anarchist poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra is to Central America.  Hart Crane's birthplace says goodbye; leaves us; is yet to be.  Whooping cranes are already extinct in our pre-coital play.  It's Madame Ky's menstrual period.  Her whole country bleeds for the rich bitches of Liberty.  And blood from India and China soaks down through the earth, drips out here to ease our famine.  India and China, please help, there is a famine here, an America-famine, and there's no longer enough America to feed Whitman or Poe, and I'm getting very thin.  Oh dropping bombs upon what no longer exists!  Glances traveling through life and death, meeting only at the moment of and of the moment of.  Touching.  Hart, heart of America, are we falling through you only to enter an extinct land-guage?  Yes, well, and nevertheless no, and no, we'll breed no more sun.  Don't walk in conception.

     Séamas Cain
     Chicago, Illinois

[Note : I recommend the poetry and other writings of Pablo Antonio Cuadra.  See, for example, Cuadra's Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea, translated and edited by Grace Schulman and Ann McCarthy de Zavala, published in 1979 by Columbia University Press in association with the Center for Inter-American Relations, New York, New York; and Cuadra's The Birth of the Sun : Selected Poems from 1935-1985, translated by Steven F. White, published in 1988 by the Unicorn Press at Greensboro, North Carolina.]

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