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from Elegy for a Dead Soldier

from Elegy for a Dead Soldier by Karl Shapiro We ask for no statistics of the killed, For nothing political impinges on This single casualty, or all those gone, Missing or healing, sinking or dispersed, Hundreds of thousands counted, millions lost. More than an accident and less than willed Is every fall, and this one like the rest. However others calculate the cost, To us the final aggregate is one, One with a name, one transferred to the blest; And though another stoops and takes the gun, We cannot add the second to the first. Karl Shapiro Reprinted by permission of University of Illinois Press from The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late (1998)

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