Fascism

Seek the goddess with floating hair,
Goddess of easy death
She is not there.

Death today
Is the jackboot
And the broken face turning away.

Once there were white petals
And the hand-scattered leaf
And time for grief.

Once we could say.
      ‘Death came like the hour
And whispered him away.’

Now death is a whip
Or nestles sullenly
On a leather hip.

There is this gain:
That fist and thought
Growing together to an iron strength
Must now tame death at length.