“
Now reading
Yesterday, to Us
TWO POEMS
YESTERDAY, TO US
With dignity of gongs
towards a vanishing-
point of flags
the political prisoner
is led-Yesterday to
us, unquiet priests of silence, the
hypnotic
doze of power was a
quality of atmosphere
peculiar to
tides columns
seals and famous
boulevards; and the common-
place (without gongs) the only
but not the
reality. The remoteness
of life is usurped now.
The distracted odds and
ends of high
authority have put braid and
uniforms on all the
corner-boys; and the decadent,
the guy who
tried to make the waitress,
had cats and velvet in
his bedroom, he rules now
in stadia
and public squares. And where that happens
the Aristotelians
hold foot-races with the
Platonists
and other connoisseurs
of naves and holy thought
to mop the vomit from
the super-
intellectual shirt. Thus
power and gongs, become
the sole reality, lead us
prisoner
between the flags . .. Oh now
silence comes to us no
more with blooms and carvéd
seas. It brings
no smiling inhalations of
deep music, no crystal
joy. No. It holds terror clawing
at the cables
of man's uneven rise; it
whizzes in our ears
like a jungle taut with
shiverings ;
it is dense with unbelievable
cries . . . We have therefore gone
out to stand watch on the crossings
yesterday
so commonplace and strange.