Fear at my heart, as at a cup,

My life-blood seemed to sip.

(S. T.  Coleridge)

 

Do not go gentle into that acquiescence.

Rage, rage against the snuffing out

Of the soul.

Dylan may have spoken thus of the dying.

But the fear that now stalks the living

Is no less powerful.

Ancestors of the menace at hand

Had seemed far away in alien land

Among books, and in alien dress;

Our follies have brought them to life—

The chill of their skeletal hand is upon us.

Everyday some forthright lip

Is sealed shut with an infected zip.

Notice how a new Moses has descended

From the mountain with a tablet of dos

And donts; follow, we hear, or embrace the noose.

Let not the truth of things cause damage

To the castle built from spurious image.

 

Are these the times when such things should be?

Moses may have meant well, but pre-dated democracy.

Take cue from the recalcitrant grass,

Which, however trampled, refuses to pass

Into oblivion. Then be the grass multifarious

That takes its death but rises, obstinate and various.

Our life is life if our truthful eye

Does not from the morning’s mirror shy.

Not sufferance but fear is our enemy;

Die into life, stand like the grass from the cemetery.

Too numerous is the grass for extinction.

Let the invincible grass be our redemption.

No oak may ever spawn enough acorn

To drown the omnipresence of grass immaculately born.

Let the thought of grass take away our fear.

Let the preponderant populace be our torch-bearer.

History’s Ozymandias now also has a day,

But the people– they are always here to stay.

Let us make of fear then a common cause,

Bring back together the republic that was.

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