The Memory of Barbarism is the Recollection of Virtue
Perhaps, when we the strangers in the bar’s blue light
turn liberal, you’d claim fraternity
or clan and say Detroit is turned American
by the community of appetite.
There was this hurried time of fear of the last bell,
our sure prognostication it would be
somber so soon to face a sky of December
that impended on the light blue snow swell,
when someone turned and told of Caucasian wheat fields,
the harvest sun, a last effrontery.
His father decapitates their Turkish master.
The village is invested. No one yields.
Then, you may know, the last round came, and with it pride.
I swivelled round to face my own whiskey
recalling anecdotes in turn of ancestral
snowfields and running wolves and fireside.
Copyright Credit: Richard Emil Braun, “The Memory of Barbarism Is the Recollection of Virtue” from Children Passing. Copyright © 1962 by Richard Emil Braun. Used by permission of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
Source: Children Passing (University of Texas Press, 1962)