All is accounted for
Except the farmer’s boy,
And the mill hand who lived near the canal,
And the young men from the city block where gutters fry in the summer.
One lies with an ocean across his chest at the bottom of an Arctic deep.
Another sleeps with sand in his eyes where he fell on a beach in Palau.
The bones of the fisherman rest in clay far from the rocks of Maine.
And the miner’s kid is under the ground of China.
The cricket sings in the summer night, but the soda jerk says nothing.
The fawn leaps in the wolf-proof wood, but jungle roots twine the postman’s feet.
The turtle is young at sixty-one, but the flier is dead at eighteen.
“14 August” broadcast August 14, 1945 on CBS