Merlin
by Geoffrey Hill
I will consider the outnumbering dead:
For they are the husks of what was rich seed.
Now, should they come together to be fed,
They would outstrip the locusts’ covering tide.
Arthur, Elaine, Mordred; they are all gone
Among the raftered galleries of bone.
By the long barrows of Logres they are made one,
And over their city stands the pinnacled corn.
And over their city stands the pinnacled corn.
1. Sally Mann, from the series Last Measure, 2000-2003. Mann visited the battle sites of the Civil War — Antietam, Manassas, Wilderness, Fredericksburg — and used the collodion process of Brady, Gardner, O’Sullivan, etc.
2. Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1932.
