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This poem is taken from PN Review 116, Volume 23 Number 6, July - August 1997.

Two Poems Iain Crichton Smith


In Eastern Europe

Waiters glide to us from defunct ideas.
They smile at us who once were frowning foes.

They bring their trays with bubbling lemonade.
Karl Marx, my friend, how did you think the
  dead

would die forever. No, they rise and smile.
Souvenirs besiege me, polished with guile,

and instead of missiles, poverty holds out
cloth for the table, bills for Marxist thought,

and infected capital wins out once more
on this expropriated silver shore




A Type

When I became a type it was a day
that I stood at a railway station bearing
...


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