The Valley Of Dry Bones poem – Ambrose Bierce poems | Poems and Poetry

With crow bones all the land is white,

From the gates of morn to the gates of night.

Picked clean, they lie on the cumbered ground,

And the politician’s paunch is round;

And he strokes it down and across as he sings:

“I’ve eaten my fill of the legs and wings,

The neck, the back, the pontifical nose,

Breast, belly and gizzard, for everything goes.

The meat that’s dark (and there’s none that’s white)

Exceeded the need of my appetite,

But I’ve bravely stuck to the needful work

That a hungry domestic hog would shirk.

I’ve eaten the fowl that the Fates commend

To reluctant lips of the People’s Friend.

Rank unspeakably, bitter as gall,

Is the bird, but I’ve eaten it, feathers and all.

I’m a dutiful statesman, I am, although

I really don’t like a diet of crow.

So I’ve dined all alone in a furtive way,

But my platter I’ve cleaned every blessed day.

They say that I bolt; so I do-my bird;

They say that I sulk, but they’ve widely erred!

O Lord! if my enemies only knew

How I’m full to the throat with the corvic stew

They’d open their ears to hear me profess

The faith compelled by the corvic stress,

(For, alas! necessity knows no law)

In the heavenly caucus-‘Caw! Caw! Caw!'”

And that ornithanthropical person tried

By flapping his arms on the air to ride;

But I knew by the way that he clacked his bill

He was just the poor, featherless biped, Dave Hill.