Page Six
TERSPECTI VES
Page Six PERSPECTI VES
A PRELUDE TO PEACE
The virus of our time, infection from intense germ fusion,
Festers. Malthus has caught us again in his
Snare. Sex must be mud or dust, and our aqueous
Origin waters itself in an empty succession
Of cities. Order is ordained: chaos incongruous.
Earth swung fixed in the grip of the nebulous sun-mother;
Souls of the nascent oceans crossed Archean
Cliffs and condensed to their shifting beds. The spirit
Over dark waters brooded, then the blind
World stumbling onto cosmic knowledge. Man is of time
And of space: those only. Consciousness questions,
Rejects terms of tenure. War is awaking,
Inking the old clause, cruelty. Peace has seen
Senile deaths and not shuddered: been mean in wise
Ways." The world is no worse for fighting. Better
Fifty years burning than a cycle in decay.
We have gone too far to flee: fought fire with fire;
The forest is felled. We are snared now; we're a nation.
But a nation is a notion: nothing but a mind-sign.
We are the people; let the old laws fall. I
Am I: all I know of the nation. I cannot die for me,
For-I need no death yet. After the prized peace
Where will the world be? Back to its shining cities:
Buildings that mould young souls in square corners,
Schools that strike, die-like, scholars from cognate
Casts: back to our walled worlds, synthetic
Suns. When we were younger, slow-learners,
Still tinged with a sun-blush, revelling in meadow bloom,
Who would have thought us endued for this megalomaniac
Moment, bound into tight sects, proferring
Parochial loyalty. Wars will prosper.
Perversion feeds preversion: institutions
And countries, crowds, London, Rome and Berlin.
Murder is better than boredom with comptometers,,
Factory smoke, lascivious spraddling park
Wantons, belles with nothing but bodies, the working
Girls, the, play-boys, jitterbugs' jutting breasts
Andbuttocks. The city is solidified by day, vaporized
By night. And.peace is liquid. What can a war
Write with white ink, City-seekers?
-Edward Hart
GRAND RAPIDS, FOR INSTANCE
A pin on the horizon will
Support a whole city;
Watch the people as doors and alleys unroll them,
The highest leaf and the curbstone converge
To my intelligent eyes and conceptual brain,
But nothing can bring them to life again.
Stupid people, alluring people
On a Sunday morning,
Your houses contain you like unbroken eggshells;
Shimmers of slanting light parade
Lawns and porches and shades flip upwards:
There must be voices busy inside
The great divide, and the great divide leans on a pin.
Irving Wei
NEW ENGLAND
New England riots when the red leavesfail:
She signs for peace with fingers of the frost;
Herstruggles haunt me, and myself I call'
Her lover, her'priest, her pilgrim who is lost;
And I must visit whereher spirit dwells:
Her-rancid fields, her acres of little or none,
Her empty pews, her rust-discordant bells,
Her shadowy mansions'that were warm with sun
But now are cold: -though ever across the years
Some blossoms of hope :and work will stoutly thrive,
For her furrows were'watered by sturdier 'wet than tears
And the faith of her lovers and friends'is still-alive.
-Lawrence P.Spingan
by CLIFFORD GRAHAM
CYCLE
Across the land each geometric farm
Has laid a harvest crop within the barn.
Against the sky in strict triangular flocks
The geese are winging to the equinox.
The autumn winds that move forevermore,
The angry ocean clawing at the shore,
The ancient advent of the ferret frost -
All these declare the languid season lost.
The stamen and the pistil soon will be
More lost than man's own'fustian fantasy.
Convicted by the cosmic law let lie
Each individual cell that would but die;
Let engines labor with the frozen grease,
Let haughty man now make his humble peace,
And findingice-clad flowers let him-know
The terror of the untamed, brutal snow.
Regarding frigid granules let him-shrink
Into his numbered house, to sit and think
-How all his works dot planetary space
As snowflakes fall and melt upon the face;
How every cycle will come back to burn
Within Time's huge, insatiable, ultimate urn!
-Charles MilIe1