Sunday: New Guinea

The bugle sounds the measured call to prayers,

The band starts bravely with a clarion hymn,

From every side, singly, in groups, in pairs,

Each to his kind of service comes to worship Him.

Our faces washed, our hearts in the right place,

We kneel or stand or listen from our tents;

Half-naked natives with their kind of grace

Move down the road with balanced staffs like mendicants.

And over the hill the guns bang like a door

And planes repeat their mission in the heights.

The jungle outmaneuvers creeping war

And crawls within the circle of our sacred rites.

I long for our disheveled Sundays home,

Breakfast, the comics, news of latest crimes,

Talk without reference, and palindromes,

Sleep and the Philharmonic and the ponderous Times.

I long for lounging in the afternoons

Of clean intelligent warmth, my brother’s mind,

Books and thin plates and flowers and shining spoons,

And your love’s presence, snowy, beautiful, and kind.

Copyright Credit: Karl Shapiro, “Sunday: New Guinea” from Selected Poems (New York: Library of America, 2003). Copyright © 2003 by Estate of Karl Shapiro. Reprinted with the permission of Wieser & Elwell, Inc.

Source: Selected Poems (2003)