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Meditations about higher matters
We now rather rarely
Write or sing about this:
Dear native fields of rye or barley
Or even new-come rural bliss...
All this our poets gladly miss.
Deposits, excavations, drilling
Get all the praise and emphasis.
At plants it is not merely steel,
It must bring glory, and achieve a hurray.
Lead on? Where To? To a glorious future,
And space beyond space reveal every day.
That is the aim of every writer.
Someone, not much to look at really,
And brains? About what a parrot has,
For talent, no high grade he'll pass,
And yet, his balding pate raised high
In proud firm steps he marches on
And calls to follow all his hangers-on...
And as he speaks his voice grows loud
Flat thoughts fit flat words about
Things learned at school by heart no doubt,
What every man so often hears
And is often bored, indeed, to tears.
Not that I'm against high mountain tracks,
Against new streams and dams and picks
But where is thought's sharp new ax?
Where true tints of life and not old tricks?
Where's that light? The ancient power?
For what the true lyre won the fame,
For what there was one real name
Which with perfect right Beauty claimed for itself.
It's high time perhaps new poems should be read
Day in, day out the same tunes flow.
Jump down a grave, to a monastery go?
Or for a change do something mad.
Go catch a cat by a bushy tail,
Or fly astride a broom in the air?
Indeed it seems we do not dare
Depict a plain nightingale.
No line indeed without high phrases
A stream no more a stream is called
but a bright road along which for hearts to face
and leads to futures bright and bold.
A green oak no more oak remains
But is a warrior, if you please,
And to ensure our life and peace
for bullets plenty scorns keeps.
Cucumbers fly to Mars and Moon
like rockets, space and time reeping
And life-filled planet pretty soon
comes from beneath such poet's pen
a dull papier-mache balloon,
Devoid of nature and of men.
Enough. No more of all that junk.
Come back to nature, true, alive.
Hack writing of its vogue deprive
Let's live and down with silly pranks!
Let proud oak be oak indeed
And let the stream flow on as stream
Let all the collective farms' clubs
Have steppe flowers, planted in their tubs
And let the omnipotent Art,
As had been done from days of old,
to each its canvass that impart
which has ever been Beauty called.