Saturday 3 September 2011

What is it we want really? For what end and how?


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)

3 comments:

  1. Yellow fog and red lipped poppies
    Drenching 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

    ReplyDelete
  2. Autumn Movement - Carl Sandburg


    I 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.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you for sharing Sandburg's Autumn Movement - 'and the old things go, not one lasts'.

    ReplyDelete

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