The cause is Ozymandian The map of Sapokanikan Is sanded and bevelled The land lorn and levelled By some unrecorded and powerful hand
Which plays along the monument And drums upon a plastic bag The brave-men-and-women-so-dear-to-God- And-famous-to-all-of-the-ages rag
Sang: Do you love me? Will you remember? The snow falls above me The renderer renders: The event is in the hand of God
Beneath a patch of grass, her Bones the old Dutch master hid While elsewhere Tobias And the angel disguise What the scholars surmise was a mother and kid
Interred with other daughters In dirt in other potters' fields Above them, parades Mark the passing of days Through parks where pale colonnades arch in marble and steel
Where all of the twenty-thousand attending your footfall And the causes they died for are lost in the idling bird calls And the records they left are cryptic at best Lost in obsolescence The text will not yield, nor x-ray reveal With any fluorescence Where the hand of the master begins and ends
I fell, I tried to do well but I won't be Will you tell the one that I love to remember and hold me I call and call for the doctor But the snow swallows me whole with ol' Florry Walker And the event lives only in print
He said: "It's alright" And "It's all over now" And boarded the plane His belt unfastened The boy was known to show unusual daring And, called a "boy" This alderman, confounding Tammany Hall In whose employ King Tamanend himself preceeded John’s fall
So we all raise a standard To which the wise and honest soul may repair To which a hunter A hundred years from now, may look and despair And see with wonder The tributes we have left to rust in the parks Swearing that our hair stood on end To see John Purroy Mitchel depart
For the Western front where work might count O mercy! O God! Go out, await the hunter to decipher the stone And what lies under the city is gone