Your landscape sickens with a dry disease 
Even in May, Virginia, and your sweet pines 
Like Frenchmen runted in a hundred wars 
Are of a child?s height in these battlefields. 

For Wilson sowed his teeth where generals prayed 
?High-sounding Lafayette and sick-eyed Lee? 
The loud Elizabethan crashed your swamps 
Like elephants and the subtle Indian fell. 

Is it for love, you ancient-minded towns, 
That on the tidy grass of your great graves 
And on your roads and riverways serene 
Between the corn with green flags in a row, 


Wheat amorous as hair and hills like breasts 
Each generation, ignorant of the last, 
Mumbling in sheds, embarrassed to salute, 
Comes back to choke on etiquette of hate? 


You manufacture history like jute? 
Labor is cheap, Virginia, for high deeds, 
But in your British dream of reputation 
The black man is your conscience and your cost. 


Here on the plains perfect for civil war 
The clapboard city like a weak mirage 
Of order rises from the sand to house 
These thousands and the paranoid Monroe; 


The sunrise gun rasps in the throat of heaven; 
The lungs of dawn are heavy and corrupt; 
We hawk and spit; our flag walks through the air 
Breathing hysteria thickly in each face. 


Through the long school of day, absent in heart, 
Distant in every thought but self we tread, 
Wheeling in blocks like large expensive toys 
That never understand except through fun. 


To steal aside as aimlessly as curs 
Is our desire; to stare at corporals 
As sceptically as boys; not to believe 
The misty-eyed letter and the cheap snapshot. 


To cross the unnatural frontier of your name 
Is our free dream, Virginia, and beyond, 
White and unpatriotic in our beds, 
To rise from sleep like driftwood out of surf. 


But stricter than parole is this same wall 
And these green clothes, a secret on the fields, 
In towns betray us to the arresting touch 
Of lady-wardens, good and evil wives. 


And far and fabulous is the word ?Outside? 
Like ?Europe? when the midnight liners sailed, 
Leaving a wake of ermine on the tide 
Where rubies drowned and eyes were softly drunk. 


Still we abhor your news and every voice 
Except the Personal Enemy?s, and songs 
That pumped by the great central heart of love 
On tides of energy at evening come. 


Instinctively to break your compact law 
Box within box, Virginia, and throw down 
The dangerous bright habits of pure form 
We struggle hideously and cry for fear. 


And like a very tired whore who stands 
Wrapped in the sensual crimson of her art 
High in the tired doorway of a street 
And beckons half-concealed the passerby, 


The sun, Virginia, on your Western stairs 
Pauses and smiles away between the trees, 
Motioning the soldier overhill to town 
To his determined hungry burst of joy.