From the Kenyon Review, Autumn 1950, Vol. XII, No. 4
Tonight our streets are filled
With beardless pirates and their high-heeled wives
Who own no maps of treasure and have killed
Nobody with their aimless wooden knives;
They cry us charity for their cups of tin.
Tonight their plea is styled
With signs of poison and the threat of crones,
While from behind a soap-scrawled window-pane,
A pumpkin with a candle for a brain
Flashes its hacked-out grin
At Jolly Roger, ensign of the child
Who stalks the street, superfluous of bones.
One time the children came
“Souling” with little songs for all the dead,
Soliciting in Mystery’s full name
Apples and cakes and pies, for it was said
A hermit raised a trapdoor and was shown
Where purgatory burned,
Whistled and hurt; he heard the demons yell
Against the monks of Cluny for their prayers
That lifted cripples up the spiral stairs.
And singing made it known:
To do grace to the dead, lest they returned,
Apples were prayers and giving was a spell.
And singers have this right,
For hunger haunts the gut, but not for bread;
The troubled presence that returns this night
When all the air is crowded with the dead,
Shivers for lack of body, and is claim
To the community
Of the mad Prince disguised in seven ways,
The Riddling Knight who challenges our sleep,
The starving Goblin and the Hag who keep,
(To their perpetual blame,)
Poor Tom o’ Bedlam from his sanity,
And sent an English king into his craze.
All of our enemies
Move through this night with polished, skinless jaws,
And kiss the daft ones into their disease,
Take from the poor, and are themselves the cause
That ghosts return upon us to be fed.
Hearing the Death’s Head cry
“O Hunger, Hunger,” shall I offer salt?
The pumpkin grins with idiotic mirth,
Laughs at the child whose bones were crossed at birth,
Who moves among these dead,
Hungry for bread and salt, and ripe to die,
And likely to come, begging, from the vault.
