from The Congo: Section 1
By Vachel Lindsay
I. THEIR BASIC SAVAGERY
Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion, THEN I had a vision.
I could not turn from their revel in derision.
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
Then along that riverbank
A thousand miles
Tattooed cannibals danced in files;
Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song
And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong.
And “BLOOD” screamed the whistles and the fifes of the warriors,
“BLOOD” screamed the skull-faced, lean witch-doctors,
“Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle,
Harry the uplands,
Steal all the cattle,
Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle,
Bing.
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM,”
A roaring, epic, rag-time tune
From the mouth of the Congo
To the Mountains of the Moon.
Death is an Elephant,
Torch-eyed and horrible,
Foam-flanked and terrible.
BOOM, steal the pygmies,
BOOM, kill the Arabs,
BOOM, kill the white men,
HOO, HOO, HOO.
Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.
Listen to the creepy proclamation,
Blown through the lairs of the forest-nation,
Blown past the white-ants’ hill of clay,
Blown past the marsh where the butterflies play: —
“Be careful what you do,
Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo,
And all of the other
Gods of the Congo,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.”
A sport made for spectating if there ever was one!
Stunning!
TerryMay 21, 2019, 2:34 PM
I ran track in HS and into college (developed serious tendonitis in both shins). If there were distractions as shown in this video, I would have been ejected from the team due to not completing the workouts. I really enjoy watching athletic women in action. Those shorts——WOW! No fat girls either!!! Difficult to vault if fat.
That Charles, always HAS to drag politics into it.
Some people….
PA CatMay 21, 2019, 8:42 PM
When I want to see cute rear ends, I watch baseball. Most of you guys don’t come close to being worth watching.
ChrisMay 21, 2019, 8:57 PM
This figures that it was Brasil. I had the good fortune to spend 6 months working in Brasil… in an office that was adjacent to a college. It was as close to paradise as a man could get. Unfortunately, I was already married, otherwise, I would have never come back to the US.
“Italy Woman’s Pole Vault”. Italian Athletics maybe on BrazilianTVHD?
JackMay 23, 2019, 9:42 AM
I remember that poem on The Congo when I was a school kid in the deep South, years before forced integration. I think I first heard it in the 2nd or 3rd grade and it is just as true today as it was then but so few today realize it exists and understands the topic. And what’s astonishing is that the black is far more prevalent and violent than he’s ever been in history and he’s growing worse.
A pretty young woman’s butt, like that pictured, is a thing of true and stunning beauty. Doesn’t matter quite so much when we’re banging on the door of 70 with a big hammer but my memory hasn’t faded and I still appreciate them and I do remember that I had a fine time with ’em when I was younger.
CallmelennieMay 23, 2019, 12:20 PM
I’ll take a stab at the one liner, JWM (actually a two liner)
Why is women’s weightlifting in the Olympics but not men’s powerlifting ? After all, hundreds of millions of men have done a bench press; how many people have ever done a woman’s snatc- (Don’t answer that!)
Well, whatever that number is, it’s probably equal to the the number who have done the woman’s pole vault
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
![Allen Ginsberg: The Interview, <strong> ➡ 1972 ⬅ </strong> [Republished by unpopular demand]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/ginsbergnirvana-150x150.jpg "Allen Ginsberg: The Interview, <strong> ➡ 1972 ⬅ </strong> [Republished by unpopular demand]")
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Comments on this entry are closed.
This is why beach volleyball was invented.
“Spanning the globe..”
Bucks? Flat racist:
from The Congo: Section 1
By Vachel Lindsay
I. THEIR BASIC SAVAGERY
Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion, THEN I had a vision.
I could not turn from their revel in derision.
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
Then along that riverbank
A thousand miles
Tattooed cannibals danced in files;
Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song
And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong.
And “BLOOD” screamed the whistles and the fifes of the warriors,
“BLOOD” screamed the skull-faced, lean witch-doctors,
“Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle,
Harry the uplands,
Steal all the cattle,
Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle,
Bing.
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM,”
A roaring, epic, rag-time tune
From the mouth of the Congo
To the Mountains of the Moon.
Death is an Elephant,
Torch-eyed and horrible,
Foam-flanked and terrible.
BOOM, steal the pygmies,
BOOM, kill the Arabs,
BOOM, kill the white men,
HOO, HOO, HOO.
Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.
Listen to the creepy proclamation,
Blown through the lairs of the forest-nation,
Blown past the white-ants’ hill of clay,
Blown past the marsh where the butterflies play: —
“Be careful what you do,
Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo,
And all of the other
Gods of the Congo,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.”
Source: The Congo (1915)
Uh, let’s see…
She can vault my…
no, no, no.
I got a pole for…
No, doesn’t work.
There’s a one-liner just waiting here somewhere.
JWM
succulent
A sport made for spectating if there ever was one!
Stunning!
I ran track in HS and into college (developed serious tendonitis in both shins). If there were distractions as shown in this video, I would have been ejected from the team due to not completing the workouts. I really enjoy watching athletic women in action. Those shorts——WOW! No fat girls either!!! Difficult to vault if fat.
Excellent item to post Gerard.
Pleasant. Entertaining. Pleasantly entertaining. Entertainingly pleasant.
Only one lefty?
That Charles, always HAS to drag politics into it.
Some people….
When I want to see cute rear ends, I watch baseball. Most of you guys don’t come close to being worth watching.
This figures that it was Brasil. I had the good fortune to spend 6 months working in Brasil… in an office that was adjacent to a college. It was as close to paradise as a man could get. Unfortunately, I was already married, otherwise, I would have never come back to the US.
Football anyone?
https://youtu.be/KvXSlgCMfho
Ha, ha PA Cat. About the difference between men and women and those old man butts, frogs and double knit pants.
https://youtu.be/riVntlVtRbk
I am very slow on the uptake. I had to watch it a number of times just to get the gist.
When I was on the boat in Alaska, one of the workers was a young Brazilian guy. The stories…
How on earth did you overlook this? Best butts in the MLB playoffs. 😁
https://betches.com/best-baseball-butts-mlb-playoffs-2017/
“Italy Woman’s Pole Vault”. Italian Athletics maybe on BrazilianTVHD?
I remember that poem on The Congo when I was a school kid in the deep South, years before forced integration. I think I first heard it in the 2nd or 3rd grade and it is just as true today as it was then but so few today realize it exists and understands the topic. And what’s astonishing is that the black is far more prevalent and violent than he’s ever been in history and he’s growing worse.
A pretty young woman’s butt, like that pictured, is a thing of true and stunning beauty. Doesn’t matter quite so much when we’re banging on the door of 70 with a big hammer but my memory hasn’t faded and I still appreciate them and I do remember that I had a fine time with ’em when I was younger.
I’ll take a stab at the one liner, JWM (actually a two liner)
Why is women’s weightlifting in the Olympics but not men’s powerlifting ? After all, hundreds of millions of men have done a bench press; how many people have ever done a woman’s snatc- (Don’t answer that!)
Well, whatever that number is, it’s probably equal to the the number who have done the woman’s pole vault