Single sheet lithograph, showing a child asleep beneath a rifle, which dangles ever more precariously as a rat gnaws at its strap: a provocative Sword of Damocles. The image's first published appearance, Howard Fast's May Day, 1947 (1947), makes obvious its function as allegory for the political and cultural state of affairs just after the close of the Second World War. The American child, at peace in a natural landscape, is nevertheless fated to violence, his natural calm undercut by a rat's greedy consumption. Few motes of foxing chiefly to margins, else near fine and quite scarce. Measures 10 by 13 in.