In 1969 Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABCDEFGEHIJKLIBMND OMOOIIPQRSTUVWXYOOAO ZDA2B2CDC2Some called it the Summer of Love although the clustered | A |
Motionless leaves that overhung the streets looked the same | B |
As ever the same as they did every summer in | C |
Anybody with three dollars could have a vision | D |
And who wouldn t want to know what it felt like to be | E |
A cedar waxwing landing with a flutter of gray wings | F |
In a spruce tree then disappearing into it | G |
For only three dollars And now I know its flight is ecstasy | E |
No matter how I look at it I also now know that | H |
The short life of a cedar waxwing is more pure pleasure | I |
Than anyone alive can still be sane bear | J |
And remember a cedar waxwing doesn t mean a thing | K |
Qua cedar or qua waxwing nor could it have earned | L |
That kind of pleasure by working to become a better | I |
Cedar waxwing They re all the same | B |
Show me a bad cedar waxwing for example I mean | M |
A really morally corrupted cedar waxwing you ll commend | N |
The cage they have reserved for you resembling heaven | D |
- | |
Some people spent their lives then having visions | O |
But in my case the morning after I dropped mescaline | M |
I had to spray Johnson grass in a vineyard of Thompson Seedless | O |
My father owned so still feeling the holiness of all things | O |
Living holding the spray gun in one hand driving with the other | I |
The tractor pulling the spray rig its sputtering motor | I |
Row after row I sprayed each weed I found | P |
That looked enough like Johnson grass a thing alive that s good | Q |
For nothing at all with a mixture of malathion diesel fuel | R |
And said to each tall weed as I coated it with a lethal mist | S |
Dominus vobiscum sometimes mea culpa until | T |
It seemed boring to apologize to weeds insincere as well | U |
For in a day or so no more than that the weeds would turn | V |
Disgusting hues of yellowish orange wither away I still felt | W |
The bird s flight in my body when I thought about it the wing ache | X |
Lifting heaven locating itself somewhere just above my slumped | Y |
Shoulders part of me taking wind I d feel it at odd moments | O |
After that on those long days I spent shoveling vines driving trucks | O |
And tractors helping swamp fruit out of one orchard | A |
Or another but as the summer went on I felt it less and less | O |
- | |
As the summer went on some were drafted some enlisted | Z |
In a generation that would not stop falling a generation | D |
Of leaves sticking to body bags when they turned them | A2 |
Over they floated back to us on television even then | B2 |
In the Summer of Love in | C |
When riot police waited beyond the doors of perception | D |
And the best thing one could do was get arrested | C2 |
Larry Levis
(1)
Poem topics: , Print This Poem , Rhyme Scheme
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