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Classic and Contemporary Poetry


GHAZALS: 39 by JAMES HARRISON

Poet Analysis

First Line: IF YOU LAID OUT ALL THE LIMBS FROM THE CIVIL WAR HOSPITAL
Last Line: OF COMPONENTS BENEATH THE SENATORS' HEADS.
Subject(s): DEATH; WASHINGTON, D.C.; DEAD, THE;

If you laid out all the limbs from the Civil War hospital
in Washington they would encircle the White House seven times.

Alaska cost two cents per acre net and when Seward
slept lightly he talked to his wife about ice.

My heart is Grant's for his bottle a day and his
foul mouth, his wife that weighed over five hundred pounds.

A hundred years later Walt Whitman often still
walks the length of the Potomac and @3on@1 the water.

A child now sees it as a place for funerals and bags
of components beneath the senators' heads.



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