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
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.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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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
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
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
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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
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
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.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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PREDICTION: THIS RACE IS GOING TO TAKE A DRAMATIC TURN TO THE RIGHT WHEN THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE HAS TO DEBATE VICE PRESIDENT PENCE.
Prediction; whatever happens in November, the democrats will continue trying to destroy this country.
Not bad. I note that Obama was never questioned seriously by reporters, beacuse: black. Now, they have Biden, whose excuse is: senile. Can’t ask him anything because c’mon man.
The Covid scenario is good. His supporters will vote for him, dead or alive, so it’s not a foul out.
I stay with my theory that they’re not really running an election, anyway. They just want to watch it all burn. Elections don’t enter into it.
They want to watch it all burn…yup.
I think there is something to the theory that they drag out the contested results from Nov.3 to Jan 21 resulting in Speaker of the House Pelosi becomes Pres. It’s constitutional…..imagine?
Can’t help but think these criminals are going to do something very BIG, bigger than most people can handle. Something so BIG it cause massive turmoil on multiple levels.
Blow up a nuclear powerplant, or a couple major airports, or a series of hospitals (VA).
BIG.
What if 90% of the grid west of the Missisip is permanently destroyed?
Or google sacrifices it’s entire cloud for the greater good?
Or 3 blocks of Wall St is Dresden’d?
As Casey has eluded, they don’t just want the election, for that is just one step on their ultimate goal of national annihilation. If they can destroy the country BEFORE the election they achieve their goals even quicker.
“A good rule of thumb is to ALWAYS overestimate your enemy for if you are wrong you win even better.”
–gs, 2099
“As Casey has eluded, they don’t just want the election, for that is just one step on their ultimate goal of national annihilation.”
Maybe Casey “elided”…? And by the way, autocucumber first tried to convince me I meant “eluded” too.
The vile filth that pretend to be fellow Americans,embodied in the Speaker of the House,are quite literally,fighting for their livelihood. And whatever foul scraps of their “reputations” the fluffer media gaslights us with.
They’re already perfectly fine with civilian assassination. They’re baiting PDT;they’re baiting US.
Yes,they’re going balls to the wall,scorched earth,nothing is sacred.
It will get worse;Ghost’s scenarios are certainly possible.
Perhaps. Biden began his drooling moron phase when his Ukraine dealings began to bubble up. If the man were truly as dementia-addled as he keeps appearing,would’nt his loving family make him quietly bow out of the strenuous race? Or is it a cover to keep him from being held to task for his (and Hunter’s) foul,corrupt,and lucrative lives of pretense?
No other American President has had to endure what PDJT has.
In the process,his enemies have revealed to the American people precisely who and what they are.
They post their insanity to Twitter proudly. (See Cuomo,et al).
Keep on keepin’ on,demwits.
Have faith. This country’s in better hands than it has been in decades.
RVD, good catch. I elide nuthin. The dems are eliding the elections, because: communism doesn’t need elections. Commies only come to power through violence, because who da fug would ever vote that shi in? Some libs, yes. But they’re stupid.
Ghost, yeps. Minimum goal: disrupt the elections. Max. goal: dissolve the country and enter some godawful form of totalitarianism. Watch for some slick Senator to stand in the well, and declare that “this government is dissolved.” A new Party will be seated, and Bob’s Your Uncle we’re done with.
alluded