For Queen and Country

                                        Sir Francis Drake 
                                                                                 great 
great    ringing of
                            alarm bells              firing of cannons 

            a singed odor            in the courtyard
                                                      of English 
   attack dogs as they came       the windows 
                                of                          shameful tortures 
 
                          red-hot    irons                              merchant 
                                                            of 

                                         terror          the business 
                                                                    of  

                                                                              pirates 

                                                  that hidden village 

                                                             with  

                                                                        so lucrative  
                          a fortune 
                                                        mad ideas  

                                    over three hundred years of 
                      that 

                                              common prick 
                                                                        that  


                                                                     expressed      desire to
         be married    to 


                                                       a cartilaginous 

                         system of 

              anguished violence 
                                                                 aroused by 
 

                                         blood 








This is an erasure poem. Source material: Márquez, Gabriel García. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. Viking, 2014. 19-21. Print. 

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Joel Harris is a Trinidad poet and editor. His poems will next appear in Bayou Magazine and have been published in petrichor, Full House Literary, South Florida Poetry Journal, Poetry London and elsewhere.