But why is the game so ordered, what crowns the kings? They are cities of streets and houses like other cities. Baltimore might be taken, and war go on, Atlanta will be taken and war go on, Why should these two near cities be otherwise? We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make. A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound, But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound, Totems of love and hate, black sorcery-stones, So with these cities. And so the third game is played, The intricate game of the watchers oversea, The shadow that falls like the shadow of a hawk’s wing Over the double-chessboard until the end⁠— The shadow of Europe, the shadows of England and France, The war of the cotton against the iron and wheat. The shadows ponder and mutter, biding their time; If the knights and bishops that play for the cotton-king Can take the capital-city of wheat and iron, The shadow-hands will turn into hands of steel And intervene for the cotton that feeds the mills.