Thursday, January 27, 2005

The Other

When the curtain of reason finally falls
and the cup of knowledge is full to the top
with God’s secrets and the essence of man,

and from earth’s confused and violent lands
the borders and flags have gone forever,
and ever-ripe gardens hold no trace, no scar

of history and its endless nightmare,
and universal truth is the speech of all –
the universities of false philosophy

as quietly dead as forgotten tongues,
and the things I have wondered upon all my life
are little problems cleared up in Primary School,

if Primary Schools are needed at all –
and when the books I’ve suffered or enjoyed
are unmasked as devils of a wrong belief

whom played upon my eyes to make me blind
to the horror of the world and the truth
of the need for violent change,

then this wandering poem about you,
O complete being of the perfect future,
this uncertain and disorderly thing,

this deceived dream and shallow whim,
this failure of artful knowledge,
will speak silence on that which I wish to say
of me, of this, of that, of the other.