Driving Through Buffalo
A Parody of Sailing to Byzantium
By Glenn Young
THAT is a country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, anyone who can, flees
- Those dying generations – in homes outgrown
The Niagara-falls, the once-ship crowded seas,
Bills, Sabers, Bison catastrophe all season long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Stays caught in the senseless city of neglect
A monument to almost no intellect.
An aged city is but a paltry thing
With tattered streets with holes, useless
Few use their mind to think, to deeply think
For most only chatter about their mortal mess,
Nor are there ringing schools for studying
Monuments of their own incompetence;
And somehow I have sailed many seas and come
To this moldy city of Buffalo.
O churches standing in Buffalo’s sky
As if a gold reminder of the past bold,
rose from its initial fires, now stuck in the lie,
And the politicians desire to keep control.
Which consumes the city’s heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying industrial base
It knows not what its future is; and leads itself
Into the being stuck to a failure of economic destiny.
The people’s nature I can never take
They seem stuck in thought of just hateful things,
But such forms endless industrial smiths make
Of hammered iron and steel enamelling
That once keep a drowsy population at work;
Now set upon the workers brow to sting
and keeps the men and ladies of Buffalo from talking
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.