NOT WITH A BANG

What is left to say?

Yeats pulled at the strings

of warp and weft, to part the curtain…

~Opening scene... stage right...

GASP!

That rough beast slouching toward

Bethlehem!~

We are over the edge,

the whimpering end of all things,

when we forget from whence

we came. We have birthed

this rampage against the past;

we murder tradition in a moral vacuum,

as the innocent young curl their lips

and burn our roots

to cold, gray ashes.

We study The Mona Lisa, The Pieta,

Picasso, and O’Keefe for the money

they are worth, and abandon the depths

of our humanity, forget how to make

intimate love to beauty.

We sneer at the foolish wisdom

of our forebears’ religion as though

we know more than the collective

dreams that have wandered from

wet paint on the walls of Lascaux, to

the Bible, the Magna Carta, and the ruins

of this “Shining city on a Hill.”

We have lost our consciousness,

the very essence of God.

We worship the beast

and abandon ourselves to its fangs

while we dance around the fires we

build in the wasteland of the West,

wave these black flags to proclaim

our proud ignorance.

Go up, thou bald heads!

See the bonfire we have built for you?

Socrates, Plato, Descartes,

Sartre and Camus! Dead wood makes such

fine flames in this dark forest where

we dance with abandon in the moonlight.

The delight of another new poison

on our tasteless tongues is what we live for,

while we turn our backs to the rusty daggers

in the hands of our enemies

and do not even recognize our own blood

leaking from the wounds of this stupid

suicide.

Reviews

[andrew mitchell]

Indeed. It’s all going up in smoke.

[Vol]

Andrew,
I wonder if those as old as i will be interviewed about what it was like to be alive while the West still set the standards.
Vol

[andrew mitchell]

Probably get a snippet of a line in a history book maybe or an old edition of reader’s digest.These days in media if you ain’t famous you ain’t important.

[Vol]

SMH..............

[John the Baptist]

Indeed. I get the same feeling when I survey the poetry pages of The New Yorker.

[Vol]

John,
It is sad isn't it? I have been told we are the last literary generation. The last to know that art is something more than the money it sells for at auction.
Vol