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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Baker Brownell

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Southward

Baker Brownell

From “In Barracks”

FORBIDDEN Mexico

Four hundred yards away—

A drunken, tawny beast—

Slept across the southward path.

“There shall no soldier go,”

The order was, “beyond

The murky middle of the stream.”

Forbidden Mexico!—

Its drifting slopes

Slid back into sun-hid distance.

Its tawny skin, sleek

With clean aridity,

Lay unpunctured by man’s growth.

Four hundred yards away—

A thousand years could sink

Into the gap between this river-bank and that.