We give up all we love that you may loathe
Intrigue and darkness, that you may disperse
The ranks of ugly tyrannies and, worse,
The sodden languor and complacent sloth.
Do not betray us, then, but come to be
Creation's crowning splendor, not its slave;
Knowing our lives were spent to keep you brave,
And that our deaths were meant to make you free.
[signed] Louis Untermeyer
Courtesy "Collier's Weekly."
Khaki-Boy
Where the torrent of Broadway leaps highest in folly and the nights
are riddled with incandescent tire and chewing gum signs; jazz
bands and musical comedies to the ticket speculators' tune of five
dollars a seat, My Khaki-Boy, covered with the golden hoar of three
hundred Metropolitan nights rose to the slightly off key grand
finale of its eighty-first matinee, curtain slithering down to
the rub-a-dud-dub of a score of pink satin drummer boys with slim
ankles and curls; a Military Sextette of the most blooded of Broadway
ponies; a back ground of purple eye-lidded privates enlisted from
the ranks of Forty-Second Street; a three hundred and fifty dollar
a week sartorial sergeant in khaki and spotlight, embracing a ninety
pound ingenue in rhinestone shoulder-straps. The tired business
man and his lady friend, the Bronx and his wife, Adelia Ohio, Dead
heads, Bald heads, Sore heads, Suburbanites, Sybarites; the poor
dear public making exit sadder than wiser.
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