YOU SHOOT AT YOURSELF, AMERICA
The Statue of Liberty's color
Grows ever more deathly pale
As, loving freedom with bullets,
You shoot at yourself, America.
You can kill yourself like that!
It's dangerous to go out
Into this nightmare world,
But it's still more dangerous
To hide in the woods.
There's a smell on earth
Of a universal Dallas.
It is frightful to live
And this fright is full of shame.
Who's going to believe false fairy tales,
When, behind a facade of noble ideas
The price of gun oil rises
And the price of human life falls?
Murderers attend funerals in mourning,
And become stockholders later,
And, once again,
Ears of grain filled with bullets
Wave in Texas fields.
--Yevgeny Yevtushenko, June 1968
