10:52 a.m. Me hate me. I'm so pretentious and it's even more insufferable that I mention I'm pretentious and yet go on being pretentious. Isn't that pretentious? Anyway. bettinas, my darling correspondent in heaven, mentions Auden's September 1, 1939 in her most recent entry; and this reminded me of a poem I've just found yesterday, which I'd written a week after September 11; I imagine that a lot of us were trying to come up with something to succeed Auden. Anyway, this is my effort, weak and feeble as it is.
True, fifty years have passed
Pacific and secured us a lull
That, temps perdu, have made our senses dull.
It did not seem overmuch to ask
Our innocence to continue, our sense
Of self constrained to no task
Greater than the propulsion from day
To day. Imagine what those birds had thought,
Sprouting wings of jet-fueled flame
From their briefcases and raincoats
As they fell, birds on fire, a mile or two
Onto the country which had blankly supported them.
They were the last hostages
Of a country unaware of ambush,
The last sleepers to wake
To a day ungirdled with furious resolve.
Start again. A new millennium,
A world checked and cross-checked with global purpose,
Awakening and slumbering to the same cultural references.
Imagine that world, six thousand lives ago.
***
Conversation is snarled. The normal heart
That Auden apostrophised has broken down,
The normal heart has broken down, and there's this sense --
Do you feel it? -- for awaiting the drop
Of the other shoe. God, I hate euphemism
But a euphemistic banality helps mitigate
The short jabbed shock of our stopped
Trust in the conveyance of days:
We try to tell each other it is not too late,
We try to tell each other that we can say
The diplomatic words that will dissipate
The stick the stab the thrust of the box-
Cutter held at all our throats.
But our conversation is snarled, and our poems
Continuously resound the same strangled note.
the Funny Show
agriculture poem
my life in the ghost of Bush
time-lapsed (part 1)
unreconciled
Images are taken without permission from the fine and trusting folks at Folk Arts of Poland; please purchase something from them. Background music stolen without permission from Epitonic, Basta Music, and just about everywhere else my unscrupulous hands could grab something. No rights reserved.