Sapokanikan - Joanna Newsom

The cause is Ozymandian

The map of Sapokanikan

Is sanded and bevelled

The land lone and levelled

By some unrecorded and powerful hand

Which plays along the monument

And drums upon a plastic bag

The brave-men-and-women-so-dear-to-God-

And-famous-to-all-of-the-ages rag

Sang: Do you love me

Will you remember

The snow falls above me

The renderer renders:

The event is in the hand of God

Beneath a patch of grass her

Bones the old Dutch master hid

While elsewhere Tobias

And the angel disguise

What the scholars surmise was a mother and kid

Interred with other daughters

In dirt in other potters' fields

Above them parades

Mark the passing of days

Through parks where you

pale colonnades arch in marble and steel

Where all of the twenty-thousand attending your footfall

And the causes they died for are lost in the idling bird calls

And the records they left are cryptic at best

Lost in obsolescence

The text will not yield nor x-ray reveal

With any fluorescence

Where the hand of the master begins and ends

I fell I tried to do well but I won't be

Will you tell the one that I love to remember and hold me

I call and call for the doctor

But the snow swallows me whole with ol' Florry Walker

And the event lives only in print

He said:

"It's alright"

And "It's all over now"

And boarded the plane

His belt unfastened

The boy was known to show unusual daring

And called a "boy"

This alderman confounding Tammany Hall

In whose employ King Tamanend himself preceeded John's fall

So we all raise a standard

To which the wise and honest soul may repair

To which a hunter

A hundred years from now may look and despair

And see with wonder

The tributes we have left to rust in the parks

Swearing that our hair stood on end

To see John Purroy Mitchel depart

For the Western front where work might count

O mercy O God

Go out await the hunter to decipher the stone

And what lies under all the city is gone

Look and despair

Look and despair