When they confess that they have lost the penial bone and outer space is <br />Once again a numinous void, when they’re kept out of Other Places, <br />And Dr Fieser falls asleep at last and dreams of unburnt faces, <br />When gold medals are won by the ton for forgetting about the different races, <br />God Bless America. <br /> <br />When in the Latin shanties the scented priesthood suffers metempsychosis <br />And with an organ entry tutti copula the dollar uncrosses <br />Itself and abdicates, when the Pax Americana cuts its losses <br />And a Pinkville memorial’s built in furious shame by Saigon’s puppet bosses, <br />God Bless America. <br /> <br />When they can be happy without noise, without knowing where on earth they’ve been, <br />When they cease to be intellectual tourists and stop wanting to be clean, <br />When they send their children to bed at the proper time and say just what they mean, <br />And no longer trust the Quarterly Symposium and the Vicarious Screen, <br />God Bless America. <br /> <br />When they feel thoroughly desolated by the short-haired Christ they pray to, <br />When they weep over their plunder of Europe stone by stone, releasing Plato <br />And other Freshman Great Books, when they switch off their Hoover and unplug Nato, <br />Pulling the chain on the CIA and awarding Time a rotten potato, <br />God Bless America. <br /> <br />When qua-birds, quickhatches and quinnets agree at last to admit the quail, <br />When Captain Queeg is seen descending from the bridge as small and pale <br />As everyone else, and is helped with sympathetic murmurs to the rail, <br />When the few true defenders of love and justice survive to tell the tale, <br />Then, perhaps then, God Bless America. <br /> <br /> <br />“God Bless America” from Collected Poems, published by Chatto & Windus.<br /><br />John Fuller<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/god-bless-america-2/
