"1st September 1939" by W.H. Auden (poetry)

DESOLATION ROW

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They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they're restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row...

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
He looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
Now you would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row...

Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody's shouting
"Which Side Are You On?"
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row

THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION...

There must be a name for it. That phenomenon when one thing occurs in many places at the same time. Today, in my daily perusal I find these words being quoted in many places.

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

I finally had to break down and look up the context and here it is. It was written in 1920 and I read that for the anti-democratic Yeats, 'the best' referred to the
traditional ruling classes of Europe, however, the places that I see these lines quoted are not anti-democratic but I don't think I will bother with trying to figure those implications. Like everyone else, I read this in my youth, but I forgot the arresting imagery.

The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

“The Second Coming” is fast becoming the official poem of the Iraq war.

HAPPY LABOR DAY

RICARDO ARJONA -- CANTANTE GUATEMALTECO

La palabras de su cancione:

MESIAS

Ha nacido el Mesías en Nueva York
anda en auto blindado por precaución
el Papa le teme a algún despido en masa.
Viene rasurado y de Christian Dior
para estar a la altura de la situación
los judíos dicen que ese es el que esperaban.
Tiene un Penthouse en Manhattan
y un piso en París
un doctorado en Harvard
y un affair con una actriz.
Toma un trago en el Village con Bill Gates
oye un poco de jazz por distracción
revisa la bolsa y le invierte a la Iglesia.
Hace un poco de jogging en Central Park
aprende Kung Fu en China Town
prepara un golpe y nadie sabe la fecha.
Tiene una escolta armada
con tipos de Israel
y una Magnum 45 para él.


* Dicen que es el que vino y juró que iba a regresar
que se hizo cirugía en las manos para disimular
que es el enviado del cielo y que está en Manhattan
y esta vez su estrategia, no es igual.


Tiene un socio en Japón, otro en Afganistán
habla a diario con dios por el internet
promueve un cambio y se ha ganado enemigos.
Ya compró CNN y está usando su espacio
con discursos que invitan a quitarnos el velo
y el caos impera y el planeta se espanta.
La Iglesia lo acusa de hereje
y el pentágono de terrorista
y en el filo de la navaja... la fe.


* Dicen que es el que vino y juro que iba a regresar...
Se ha suicidado un magnate en la Gran Manzana
se lee en la portada del New York Time
sy una nube de dudas le hacen sombra al sol