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This poem is taken from PN Review 36, Volume 10 Number 4, March - April 1984.

Tractatus Derek Mahon

'The world is everything that is the case'
From the fly giving up in the coal-shed
To the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
Give blame, praise, to the fumbling God
Who hides, shame-facèdly, His agèd face;
Whose light retires behind its veil of cloud.

The world, though, is also so much more -
Everything that is the case imaginatively.
...


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