"There's not much doubt in any of our minds that no complete idea springs fully formed from our brow,
needing only a handshake and a signature on the contract to send it off into the world to make twenty-five billion dollars.
The germ of the idea grows slowly..." - Walt Kelly

Saturday, April 5, 2014

The bliss of modern construction

Day Five: The Golden Shovel. Basically, the last word of each line is a word from another poem, in order, so that you can read that other poem by going down each line of mine. You'll see what I mean. In this poem is the last stanza of W.H. Auden's As I Walked Out One Evening.

A roof has no concept of what rises above it,
and none of what happens below it, or what was
here before blueprints, when nature's hour was late,
when men put wood and brick together in the late
hours of summer, when the clouds grew colder in
the night skies of the northeastern lands. The
roof has no concept of what it hides in the evening,
what the human eye yearns to understand: The
grandest mystery borne in the arms of lovers
or the mouths of scholars. What, really, do they
know? They can tell us nothing about when we were
but an idea in the mind of a builder, a thought long gone.

A street has no concept of what passes upon it, the
usual traffic, speeding up and slowing down, racing clocks
to a deadline, to a delivery. It would be no better had
we learned from the past, for the past had ceased
to teach us anything when we stopped listening. Their
arguments and justifications count for nothing, chiming
bells in a city overrun with mechanical noises, and
the street is oblivious to this as well. Nor does it know the
taste of blood that has spilled upon it, drops of deep
hatred that have fallen here and collected in a swollen river
of interrupted dreams. The street doesn't know who ran
and left muddy footprints on it while the sky turned on.
_________________________________________________

Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Ab-Soul & Kendrick Lamar, ILLuminate

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