Here under the rays of the sun
Where everything grows so vividly
In the human mind and in the heart,
Love, life, and all else so beautifully,
I think again of men as innocent as I am
Pent in a cold unjust walk between steel bars,
Their trousers slit for the electrodes
And their hair cut for the cap
Because of the unconcern of men and women,
Respectable and respected and professedly Christian,
Idle-busy among the flowers of their gardens here
Under the gay-tipped rays of the sun.
And I am suddenly completely bereft
Of la grande amitié des choses créés,
The unity of life which can only be forged by love
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
A collaboration between Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse the album in it’s entirety is available for streaming online for free at NPR. From NPR; The album features:
The album has been released by the artist as a blank printed CD-R along with a poster. User’s are then led to their own methods of getting the music on the disc. This was after a dispute with record label EMI. It seems the only ones to win from this is the artists and the fans.
by Marianne Moore
“No water so still as the
dead fountains of Versailles.” No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
as the chintz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.
Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea urchins, and everlastings,
it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculptured
flowers – at ease and tall. The king is dead.
When the summer fields are mown,
When the birds are fledged and flown,
And the dry leaves strew the path;
With the falling of the snow,
With the cawing of the crow,
Once again the fields we mow
And gather in the aftermath.
Not the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
Not the upland clover bloom;
But the rowen mixed with weeds,
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
In the silence and the gloom.
I will start adding speeches along with poetry every few weeks. This one is an excerpt from President Obama at the 65th Anniversary of the Normandy Landings a few days ago on June 6th, 2009 at the Normandy American Cometary and Memorial overlooking Omaha beach.
We live in a world of competing beliefs and claims about what is true. It is a world of varied religions and cultures and forms of government.
In such a world, it is rare for a struggle to emerge that speaks to something universal about humanity.
The Second World War did that. No man who shed blood or lost a brother would say that war is good.
But all know that this war was essential. For what we faced in Nazi totalitarianism was not just a battle of competing interests. It was a competing vision of humanity.
Nazi ideology sought to subjugate, humiliate, and exterminate. It perpetrated murder on a massive scale, fueled by a hatred of those who were deemed different and therefore inferior.
Copyright 2009 by James McGowan. Photos are Copyright by their respective owners, they are listed as Creative Commons, out of copyright, attributed, or my own.
