Conscription Camp

Your landscape sickens with a dry disease

Even in May, Virginia, and your sweet pines

Like Frenchmen runted in a hundred wars

Are of a child’s height in these battlefields.

For Wilson sowed his teeth where generals prayed

—High-sounding Lafayette and sick-eyed Lee—

The loud Elizabethan crashed your swamps

Like elephants and the subtle Indian fell.

Is it for love, you ancient-minded towns,

That on the tidy grass of your great graves

And on your roads and riverways serene

Between the corn with green flags in a row,

Wheat amorous as hair and hills like breasts

Each generation, ignorant of the last,

Mumbling in sheds, embarrassed to salute,

Comes back to choke on etiquette of hate?

You manufacture history like jute—

Labor is cheap, Virginia, for high deeds,

But in your British dream of reputation

The black man is your conscience and your cost.

Here on the plains perfect for civil war

The clapboard city like a weak mirage

Of order rises from the sand to house

These thousands and the paranoid Monroe;

The sunrise gun rasps in the throat of heaven;

The lungs of dawn are heavy and corrupt;

We hawk and spit; our flag walks through the air

Breathing hysteria thickly in each face.

Through the long school of day, absent in heart,

Distant in every thought but self we tread,

Wheeling in blocks like large expensive toys

That never understand except through fun.

To steal aside as aimlessly as curs

Is our desire; to stare at corporals

As sceptically as boys; not to believe

The misty-eyed letter and the cheap snapshot.

To cross the unnatural frontier of your name

Is our free dream, Virginia, and beyond,

White and unpatriotic in our beds,

To rise from sleep like driftwood out of surf.

But stricter than parole is this same wall

And these green clothes, a secret on the fields,

In towns betray us to the arresting touch

Of lady-wardens, good and evil wives.

And far and fabulous is the word “Outside”

Like “Europe” when the midnight liners sailed,

Leaving a wake of ermine on the tide

Where rubies drowned and eyes were softly drunk.

Still we abhor your news and every voice

Except the Personal Enemy’s, and songs

That pumped by the great central heart of love

On tides of energy at evening come.

Instinctively to break your compact law

Box within box, Virginia, and throw down

The dangerous bright habits of pure form

We struggle hideously and cry for fear.

And like a very tired whore who stands

Wrapped in the sensual crimson of her art

High in the tired doorway of a street

And beckons half-concealed the passerby,

The sun, Virginia, on your Western stairs

Pauses and smiles away between the trees,

Motioning the soldier overhill to town

To his determined hungry burst of joy.

Copyright Credit: Karl Shapiro, “Conscription Camp” 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: Poetry (November 1941)