US Poetry 1966

The best of times and the worst of times.

Now Science with its right hand unveils the more and more delicate machineries of life just before (or after) its left hand destroys them. The same ravaging giant who threatens to demolish it utterly on earth is the only creature who can comprehend and glorify Creation… but no, we'd better not allow ourselves even that little egoism. Doesn't the crane whoop in celebration, the honker honk in celebration, the otter dive and slide in celebration, the coyote bark in celebration, the buffalo paw and grunt in celebration? We aim a black box and scratch on beaten wood pulp.

A man will never know again.
Thinking we won, we were the only losers.

Man always kills the thing he loves...

We must look funny to Someone,
Tumbling through the universe locked in a death grip with
our tiny ball Earth and ripping her busily to pieces,
trailing a stinking film of gas and pieces of satellites
and mushroom and dust clouds.

The weed will win in the end, of course,

Time is on our side, boys, time is on our side.

Thine alabaster towns will tumble, thine engines rot to dust.
Man will break his date with the future,
No matter how long he wants to play outlaw, no
matter how long he wants to gallop through
town shooting like a madman and hooting
at the laws of nature's god.
It is not they that he has made obsolete, it is
himself.

This knowledge is called wisdom

----

The Song of Finis

At the end of All the Ages
A Knight sate on his steed,
His armour red and thin with rust
His soul from sorrow freed;

And he lifted up his visor
From a face of skin and bone,
And his horse turned head and whinnied
As the twain stood there alone.

No bird above that steep of time
Sang of a livelong quest;
No wind breathed,

Rest:

"Lone for an end!" cried Knight to steed,
Loosed an eager rein--
Charged with his challenge into space:
And quiet did quiet remain.

Walter De La Mare

---

So man is not what he appears.
I had been blind a thousand years.

Wisdom older than the seers,
Beauty much to deep for tears,
And holy silence bursts the ears.

Ssh. The music of the spheres.

---

All passages taken from:

"On the Loose"

Sierra Club, 1966

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