Louis MacNeice in Autumn Journal (1939) answers:
If it is something feasible, obtainable,
.....Let us dream it now,
And pray for a possible land
.....Not of sleepwalkers, not of angry puppets,
But where both hand and brain can understand
.....The movements of our fellows;
Where life is an instrument and none
.....Is debarred his natural music,
Where the waters of life are free of the ice-blockade of hunger
.....And thought is as free as the sun,
Where the altars of sheer power and mere profit
.....Have fallen to disuse,
Where nobody sees the use
.....Of buying money and blood at the cost of blood and money,
Where the individual, no longer squandered
.....In self-assertion, works with the rest, endowed
With the split vision of a juggler and the quick lock of a taxi,
.....Where the people are more than a crowd.
—from Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal, xxiv (pp. 81-82)
Yellow fog and red lipped poppies
ReplyDeleteDrenching us in a rain of sighs
Their blood entering our veins
In the needled thorns of their lies
Looking endlessly for peace
Do you long for peaceful sleep
That absence of malice and violence
Would you banish devils and demons
Back to their misbegotten hells
That we may live in endless light
But blood and sighs will not allow this
Tears and terrors live in our dreams
Pumping our heart and feeding our mind
Defining our chosen path
Through the mountains of cold and ice
From my poem "Blood Secrets"
yamabuki
Autumn Movement - Carl Sandburg
ReplyDeleteI cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.
The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.
The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes,
new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind,
and the old things go, not one lasts.
Thank you for sharing Sandburg's Autumn Movement - 'and the old things go, not one lasts'.
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