Landscape with Bayonets

Platoons of silver porcupines

Raise their irascible iron quills.

The columns gleam, the blades are spines

Against the hot Missouri hills.

Metallic vertebrae flash forth

Signals of murder, South and North.

The hills respond: they signal summer;

Perspiring prairies, East and West,

Slumber as rifleman and drummer

Step smartly past a velvet crest.

The rigid blades of battle pass

Above the bending blades of grass.

Pastures across the sea are pocked,

The farms are deserts on distant shores,

Orchards are veterans, scarred and shocked;

But American hills are unmarred by wars:

Peace is a plausible green illusion

And bayonets a steel intrusion.