This poem is taken from PN Review 36, Volume 10 Number 4, March - April 1984.
The Chain
Above us, numbing all our dreams with tales
Of bad islands, infestations of gulls,
The metal broadsides of our great ark tower.
There hangs the chain: sealed rounds of iron
Whose chafe and rust, they say, ensure our freedom.
Paid out with its reel of swollen fathoms
Something of us gropes there, where deeper, deeper,
The hook works pain into a muddy craw.
...
Of bad islands, infestations of gulls,
The metal broadsides of our great ark tower.
There hangs the chain: sealed rounds of iron
Whose chafe and rust, they say, ensure our freedom.
Paid out with its reel of swollen fathoms
Something of us gropes there, where deeper, deeper,
The hook works pain into a muddy craw.
...
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