I may be oversusceptible to news
But what I see in the papers leaves me numb.
The bomb. The ultimatum. Wires hum—
Adult impersonators giving interviews,
As if that helped. What would? I've thought of it.
With all due ceremony—flags unfurled,
Choirs, priests—the leaders of a sobered world
Should meet, kneel down, and, joining hands, submit
To execution: say in Rome or Nice—
Towns whose economy depends on crowds.
Ah, but those boys, their heads aren't in the clouds.
They would find reasons not to die for peace.
Damn them. I'd give my life. Each day I meet
Men like me, young, indignant. We're not cranks.
Will some of them step up? That's plenty. Thanks.
Now let's move before we get cold feet.
Music we'll need, and short, clear speeches given
Days of maximum coverage in the press.
We'll emphasize disinterestedness,
Drive the point home that someone could be driven
To do this. Where to go? Why not Japan,
Land of the honorable suicide.
And will the world change heart? Until we've tried,
No one can say it will not. No one can.
by James Merrill
2 comments:
Have you read Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene? Chapter Twelve's analysis of the "Prisoner's Dilemma" gives one a great deal of hope that the altruistic gene may win out. Only trouble is that it'll be in the long, slow "eratial" (I made up that word) time of natural selection. You and I have no chance to live in that world.
BERTOLINO SAYS,
in the Quarterly Review
of Literature
Volume 26, 1986:
"We remember
don't we
what the persimmon
said
pucker
and the avocado
and what the stalk
of celery
shouted
Oh my strings
my lovely strings",
and I say,
to quote myself,
"I drove a spine of road through wheat fields home.
An old love going dumb, I looked for words
In fields that lay on either hand: it's hard, I thought,
To let a language go that holds a world in place.
It was that pain of loss which made me stop
Beside the road and watch a storm ease
Brooding from the south, the fields open to the rain.
Miles away, the rain fell whispering to the ground
While love lay speechless in this hull of flesh.
I considered language and the message of that far
And whispered rain, the distance I had traveled
To be stopped by pain between old language and a
Vision which made that language obsolete. So much,
I decided, depends on rain and the willingness of seeds,"
in Bellowing Ark
Volume One, Number Six
September/October, 1985.
All us poets learning
to be so damn clever
even editors urging us to be
obscure
creating beauty in the dance of language
rather than
in the thing itself like
catching
the idea of the fish
rather than
the slimy cod itself.
You can't eat
the idea
of a fish, can you,
Sylvia?
Beauty obscuring truth,
(sorry Keats),
a child
telling his truth
in a secret art of language
his parents can't decipher
(they'd abandon him for sure
if they could,
even if
they are already dead)
till this dysfunction becomes
the artistic ideal:
the bright color
that spurts
when you drag
the knife up
your wrist
dripping on the avocado
drowning
the talking celery
because you lie
so beautifully
that's what I wanted
to say
clearly
because I remember
don't I
what the eye yelled
scream
and the mouth went
blind?
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