Pastoral Poem Past
Posted: February 3rd, 2011, 12:30 pm
Are there habitable lands free of people
where one can go
hear a stream
or a hawk
or the wind caressing leaves?
Are there too many of us,
too loud with our voices, our machines?
Have we thrown the night's quiet
into the attic,
while pounding the electric-lit air
into a flat consciousness
where we dance
on the floor of our music.
Yet we do not touch
but wiggle our own selves
free of thought, memory,
anything that mattered
in the day.
Loud, waking sleep
we snore the exhale of our culture,
the pots and pans of dissonance,
the acquisitive march
of our hearts
and all that was Wordsworth,
except in those few barren hills
where the wind rushes empty-handed,
has been co-opted
and is for sale.
where one can go
hear a stream
or a hawk
or the wind caressing leaves?
Are there too many of us,
too loud with our voices, our machines?
Have we thrown the night's quiet
into the attic,
while pounding the electric-lit air
into a flat consciousness
where we dance
on the floor of our music.
Yet we do not touch
but wiggle our own selves
free of thought, memory,
anything that mattered
in the day.
Loud, waking sleep
we snore the exhale of our culture,
the pots and pans of dissonance,
the acquisitive march
of our hearts
and all that was Wordsworth,
except in those few barren hills
where the wind rushes empty-handed,
has been co-opted
and is for sale.
