You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I'll tell you all the news:
men are scattered and smeared over the desert grass,
And the generals have accomplished nothing.
Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
My friend, if you could see
you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie:
Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
If in some smothering dreams,
you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
Yet the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
my
mother hoped that
i would die etcetera
bravely of course my father used
to become hoarse talking about how it was
a privilege and if only he
could meanwhile my
self etcetera lay quietly
in the deep mud et c
(dreaming,
et
cetera, of
Your smile
eyes knees and of your Etcetera)
Last year we fought by the head-stream of the Sang-kan,
This year we are fighting on the Tsung-ho road.
At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun,
We have washed our armor in the waves of the Chiao-chi lake,
We have pastured our horses on Tien-shan's snowy slopes.
The long, long war goes on ten thousand miles from home,
Our three armies are worn and grown old.
Smiles and triumphant careless laughter. O
The pain of them, wide Earth's most sacred things!
Lying in dug-outs, hearing the great shells slow
Sailing mile-high, the heart mounts higher and sings.
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud.
O Jesus, make it stop!
Lying in dug-outs, joking idly, wearily;
Watching the candle guttering in the draught;
Hearing the great shells go high over us, eerily
Singing; how often have I turned over, and laughed
‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.’
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here
but
if i believe
in death be sure
of this
it is
because you have loved me
I’m with you
I’m with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
Wilfred Owen; Li Po; Siegfried Sassoon; Ivor Gurney; Kaminsky; Neruda; Yeats; Cummings; Ginsberg; Eliot
Auferre, rapere, trucidare falsibus nominbus imperiuym, atque solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.
They kill, rape and pillage and they call it 'to govern' and where they create a desert, they call it 'peace'.
Pax Romana
Tacitus
It was FEAR what made our brains grow larger
The World had become a frightening place
as did all Others...
Our Every Attention was on Alert
We're ever alert
a most frightened creature
dis-eased and dying from Stress...
And we'll take the World down with us...
It was Insecurity what made our brains grow larger
Every Thought and Attention determined by the
Need for Protection...
Who'd athought our Big Brain would Doom Us ?