KARL SHAPIRO

Down streets
mouthing Browning
averse to the collages
in your mind's red eye
feeling in your tweed suit
secure as any
bourgeois George
not lost to vocation
but like your ancestors
of poets, priests and kings
a sense of achievement
yet not lost to history
after the last war
expecting a day of peace
yet there is a commotion
in the public park,
a dachshund is lost
the gardener is watering
a lonely geranium
some busy politician
takes the flower
for his button hole
now securing votes
from his constituency
in the darkness
by a child's swing.