plato told
him:he couldn't
believe it(jesus
told him;he
wouldn't believe
itlao
tsze
certainly told
him,and general
(yes
mam)
sherman;
and even
(believe it
or
not)you
told him:i told
him;we told him
(he didn't believe it,no
sir)it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth
avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell
him
-e. e. cummings
I never understood this poem, until one day I was talking to this guy who was alive during
WWII and I asked him what happened to
street cars. I knew that the city I grew up in used to have them, and that a lot of
American cities did and that hardly any had them any more and maybe I was absent that day in school but I didn't know why. This guy told me that he remembered them digging up all the
tracks and melting the them down to make
munitions for the world war 2. We used the bones of our cities to kill people on the other side of the world. That's the nipponized bit of the old 6th avenue El in the poem.
I had originally assumed that Plato and Loa Tse and Jesus were telling 'him' that "war is bad", but now I think maybe they were telling him "you're gonna die". I find this sort of thing absolutely amazing.