WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
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
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
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Say not the struggle naught availeth…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLUpP9UIlmI
A suitable homily for today.
Alas far too many are willing to give up living to keep from dying and hence are antiseptic babies.
Strictly Germ-Proof
Arthur Guiterman
The Antiseptic Baby and the Prophylactic Pup
Were playing in the garden when the Bunny gambolled up;
They looked upon the creature with a loathing undisguised;
It wasn’t disinfected and it wasn’t sterilised.
They said it was microbic and a hotbed of disease;
They steamed it in a vapor of a thousand-odd degrees;
They froze it in a freezer that was cold as banished hope
And washed it in permanganate with carbolated soap.
In sulphurated hydrogen they steeped its wiggly ears;
They trimmed its frisky whiskers with a pair of hard-boiled shears;
They donned their rubber mittens and they took it by the hand
And ’lected it a member of the Fumigated Band.
There’s not a micrococcus in the garden where they play;
They bathe in pure iodoform a dozen times a day;
And each imbibes his rations from a hygienic cup —
The Bunny and The Baby and The Prophylactic Pup.
Loved that. Was it his own voice?
Thank you.
Frost’s home final home was in Derry NH.
The farm is right around the corner from our home.
Mr. Frost wrote a poem about the tree at his window.
Tree at my window
Time went on and the tree continued past Mr. Frost.
The town was worried that the tree would die, fall and destroy a famous landmark.
So the “Conservation Commission” in town decided to take the tree down.
Bids were requested and reviewed.
The winning bidder was granted the rights to the wood.
The tree was successfully dropped, away from the window.
The farm was saved.
The guys who won the bid, built hot shit Audi’s and carved wood.
They sectioned that tree up, sold a bunch of it to “Historical Societies” and carved the rest into figurines.
I have one.
It looks like the tree outside my window.
“Live Free or Die”
C