Robert Lowell - For the Union Dead lyrics

Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam. The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.52 The airy tanks are dry. Once my nose crawled like a snail on the gla**; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noses of the crowded, compliant fish. My hand draws back. I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and gra** to gouge their underworld garage. Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake. Two months after marching through Boston, half of the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compa**-needle. He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gentle tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy. He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die- when he leads his black soldiers to d**h, he cannot bend his back. On a thousand small town New England greens the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year- wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns… Shaw's father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son's body was thrown and lost with his 'n******gs.' The ditch is nearer. There are no statues for the last war here; on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling over a Mosler Safe, the 'Rock of Ages' that survived the blast. Space is nearer. when I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons. Colonel Shaw is riding on his bubble, he waits for the blessed break. The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.