To rebel. So I have saved my life, not once but over and over these sixty years, and I'm grateful to myself, of course. Epidemic time, the bomb, gives any health a special importance. Yet can it mean survival? This puppet dance of outraged dignity, so theatrical, this mime of Being? How futile. It asks more than rhyme, not a changed self only, but changed existence, and there is none. I don't know why rebellion doesn't suffice. Maybe after all some given in humanness, the "natural" dream of heaven, drives us to hope, the one chance in a million. But I give up. Comrades, you can have my books. No longer will I throw poems at the fat archdukes. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE LIVING DEAD by RALPH CHAPLIN ONCE WITH DEATH NEAR by REBA MAXWELL AVERY SONNETS OF MANHOOD: 33. RED DAWN by GEORGE BARLOW (1847-1913) SUNSHINE AND SHADOW by ROBERT BROWN PEGGIE'S CHARMS by ROBERT BURNS BUFFALO by FLORENCE EARLE COATES THE PRAIRIE SCHOONER by EDWARD EVERETT DALE |