Emotions and Feelings

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

We, the rescued, Beg you: Show us your sun, but gradually. Lead us from star to star, step by step. Be gentle when you teach us to live again. 2

I am caught like a beast at bay. Somewhere are people, freedom, light, But all I hear is the baying of the pack, There is no way out for me.

But what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?

But what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?

I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees’ hypocrisy. To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field. 1

If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot.

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I must confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate. Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I must confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate. Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.

I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed… here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars.

No foreign sky protected me, no stranger’s wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place.

No foreign sky protected me, no stranger’s wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place.

That was a time when only the dead could smile.

To joyously savor one single instant of initial life I seek an innocent country 1

How should I know what I’ll be, I who don’t know what I am? Be what I think? But I think of being so many things! And there are so many who think of being the same thing that we can’t all be it! Genius? At this moment A hundred thousand brains are dreaming they’re geniuses like me, And it may be that history won’t remember even one, All their imagined conquests amounting to so much dung.

Just when you think you’re on the point of release From loneliness, then loneliness swoops down upon you.

A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well 10 When the tongues of flame are infolded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.

Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove.

Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove.

But fare forward, voyagers.

Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always— Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after.

Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity. His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare, And when you reach the scene of the crime— Macavity’s not there!