New Year’s Dawn, 1947

Two morning stars, Venus and Jupiter,

Walk in the pale and liquid light

Above the color of these dawns; and as the tide of light

Rises higher the great planet vanishes

While the nearer still shines. The yellow wave of light

In the east and south reddens, the opaque ocean

Becomes pale purple: 0 delicate

Earnestness of dawn, the fervor and pallor.

Stubbornly I think again: The state is a blackmailer,

Honest or not, with whom we make (within reason)

Our accommodations. There is no valid authority

In church nor state, custom, scripture nor creed,

But only in one's own conscience and the beauty of things.

Doggedly I think again: One's conscience is a trick oracle,

Worked by parents and nurse-maids, the pressure of the

people,

And the delusions of dead prophets: trust it not.

Wash it clean to receive the transhuman beauty: then

trust it.

Quia Absurdum

GUARD yourself from the terrible empty light of

    space, the bottomless

Pool of the stars. (Expose yourself to it: you might learn

something.)

Guard yourself from perceiving the inherent nastiness of

man and woman.

(Expose your mind to it: you might learn something.)

Faith, as they now confess, is preposterous, an act of will.

Choose the Christian sheep-cote

Or the Communist rat-fight: faith will cover your head

Be Angry at the Sun

That public men publish falsehoods

Is nothing new.  That America must accept

Like the historical republics corruption and empire

Has been known for years.

Be angry at the sun for setting

If these things anger you.  Watch the wheel slope and turn,

They are all bound on the wheel, these people,

     those warriors.

This republic, Europe, Asia.

Observe them gesticulating,

Observe them going down.  The gang serves lies,

     the passionate

Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth

Hunts in no pack. 

You are not Catullus, you know,

To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar.  You

     are far

From Dante’s feet, but even farther from his dirty

Political hatreds. 

Let boys want pleasure, and men

Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,

And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes

     to be duped.

Yours is not theirs.

Advice to Pilgrims
That our senses lie and our minds trick us is true,

but in general

They are honest rustics; trust them a little;

The senses more than the mind, and your own mind more

than another man's.

As to the mind's pilot, intuition

Catch him clean and stark naked, he is first of truth-

tellers; dream-clothed, or dirty

With fears and wishes, he is prince of liars.

The first fear is of death: trust no immortalist. The first

desire

Is to be loved: trust no mother's son.

Finally I say let demagogues and world-redeemers babble

their emptiness

To empty ears; twice duped is too much.

Walk on gaunt shores and avoid the people; rock and

wave are good prophets;

Wise are the wing's of the gull. pleasant her song.

We Are Those People

I have abhorred the wars and despised the liars, laughed at the frightened

And forecast victory; never one moment's doubt.

But now not far, over the backs of some crawling years, the next

Great war's column of dust and fire writhes

Up the sides of the sky: it becomes clear that we too may suffer

What others have, the brutal horror of defeat—

Or if not in the next, then in the next—therefore watch Germany

And read the future. We wish, of course, that our women

Would die like biting rats in the cellars, our men like wolves on the mountain:

It will not be so. Our men will curse, cringe, obey;

Our women uncover themselves to the grinning victors for bits of chocolate.