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PAR T Between Two Prisoners I would not wish to sit In my shape bound together with wire, Wedged into a child's sprained desk In the schoolhouse under the palm tree. Only those who did could have done it. One bled from a cut on his temple, And sat with his yellow head bowed, His wound for him painfully thinking. A beliefin words grew upon them That the unbound, who walk, cannot know. The guard at the window leaned close In a movement he took from the palm tree, To hear, in a foreign tongue, All things which cannot be said. In the splintering clapboard room They rested the sides oftheir faces On the tops ofthe desks as they talked. Because ofthe presence ofchildren In the deep signs carved in the desk tops, Signs on the empty blackboard Began, like a rain, to appear. In the luminous chalks ofall colors, Green face, yellow breast, white sails Whose wing feathers made the wall burn Like a waterfall seen in a fever, Drowning with Others / 94 TWO ...

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