In Cuba + 

Our Administration + 

Had made a new nation⁠— + 

As new as a nation could be. + 

A raven was flapping + 

Above it and snapping + 

His beak with a manifest glee. + 

“O raven, what is it you see + 

That causes the manifest glee? + 

“You can’t be designing + 

A programme of dining + 

On anything living and free. + 

You’re famous for dinners + 

That plain-speaking sinners + 

Condemn with the Terrible D! + 

(The word is abhorrent to me + 

That begins with the Terrible D.) + 

“Come down from your airy + 

Position and tarry + 

Awhile on this coconut tree, + 

And tell me what joying + 

You find in annoying + 

A nation so young and so free⁠— + 

Not dead in the slightest degree, + 

But lively and healthy as we.” + 

The raven, complying, + 

Said, solemnly eying + 

My edible parts from the tree: + 

“It isn’t to nations + 

I look for my rations + 

To any extent or degree. + 

They don’t fill the hollow in me + 

To an appreciable degree. + 

“Yet the seasons ensuing + 

Will see something doing + 

To heighten my manifest glee. + 

’Tis soldiers that mostly + 

Appeal to my ghostly + 

Unusual appetite, see? + 

They’re easy digesting to me + 

With my singular appetite, see?” + 

Then I hammered my forehead + 

To think of that horrid + 

Old bird with his appetite free, + 

A-sitting there, lacking + 

Compassion and cracking + 

His beak, on a coconut tree, + 

As if merely saying to me: + 

“Oh, what a fine coconut tree.” + 

I said somewhat later: + 

“Our Administrator + 

Of Freedom’s estate, O see! + 

His Administration + 

Presents us a ‘nation’ + 

That’s spelled with the Terrible D! + 

And ‘nation’ is hateful to me + 

When led by the Terrible D.” + 