Prison Song

A poem by Alan Dugan

The skin ripples over my body like moon-wooed water,

rearing to escape me. Where could it find another

animal as naked as the one it hates to cover?

Once it told me what was happening outside,

who was attacking, who caressing, and what the air

was doing to feed or freeze me. Now I wake up

dark at night, in a textureless ocean of ignorance,

or fruit bites back and water bruises like a stone.

It’s jealousy, because I look for other tools to know

with, and other armor, better girded to my wish.

So let it lie, turn off the clues or try to leave:

sewn on me seamless like those painful shirts

the body-hating saints wore, the sheath of hell

is pierced to my darkness nonetheless: what traitors

labor in my face, what hints they smuggle through

its arching guard! But even in the night it jails,

with nothing but its lies and silences to feed upon,

the jail itself can make a scenery, sing prison songs,

and set off fireworks to praise a homemade day.

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Poems in English 

• Written In A Volume Of The Comtesse De Noailles by Alan Seeger
• Kyrenaikos by Alan Seeger
• With A Copy Of Shakespeares Sonnets On Leaving College by Alan Seeger
• Juvenilia An Ode To Natural Beauty by Alan Seeger
• Vivien by Alan Seeger
• I Loved by Alan Seeger
• Virginibus Puerisque by Alan Seeger
• I Have A Rendezvous With Death by Alan Seeger
• Translations Dante Inferno Canto Xxvi by Alan Seeger
• Fragments by Alan Seeger
• To England At The Outbreak Of The Balkan War by Alan Seeger
• Eudaemon by Alan Seeger
• Tithonus by Alan Seeger
• The Wanderer by Alan Seeger
• The Torture Of Cuauhtemoc by Alan Seeger
• The Sultans Palace by Alan Seeger
• The Rendezvous by Alan Seeger
• The Old Lowe House Staten Island by Alan Seeger
• The Nympholept by Alan Seeger
• The Need To Love by Alan Seeger

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