Death at Lenin's Tomb

His flesh greyed to marble, when Death regards it,

Is surely ridiculous:

So much medicined just to dissemble

How vulnerable it was.

His soul? also ridiculous,

Disallowed any credible place.

And nevertheless Death is not disposed

To regard him with ridicule.

His ideas... if his ideas

Are not also contradicted

In particular his idea

Of dissolving man's quarrel with man,

Uniting all men against Death. . . .

The man is not wholly dead,

Not done with history ...

Dead and not dead .. . and Death,

The Professional of the Past,

Must have a care for the morrow

And horror of history. . . .

If this dead man is too subtle

To be wholly dead

Many subtle deaths must go:

Death the diplomat,

Death the general,

Death the boss,

As Death the long night

When fire was struck,

As Death the distance

When the first wheel rolled,

As Death the sacrifice fell

With the stone bowels of God!

If this man is too subtle to be wholly dead

All subtle deaths must exit, go

As the body goes;

As the enigmatic human face

Goes to facilitate the grass

All mystifying deaths must go

To return natural, naive,

As the snowfall,

The rainstorm,

The animals,

As the walking by water of a bright morning

Listening to a clear bird.

And Death once become transparent for man

Shall mystify Death: Death

Soliloquizing to increase confidence,

Escaping into a legend,

Death in need of a poem

Like "The Bullets of Blood are Eternal,"

Death afraid of Death's own craft, aircraft and anti-aircraft,

Possible models

For an anti-angel gun!

Death recites this enemy's violent vision

Here by the enemy's tomb,

Not in mockery, not in dread,

Rather respectful of such drastic illusion,

Pious before what is not to be.

Yet mindful of the irony

That this tomb is instrument

Of deaths so sophisticate

As Death the bureaucrat,

Death the theorist,

As that most subtle

Death the plan.