THE POLICY AND THE PENDULUM

THE POLICY AND THE PENDULUM

The Ivy Leaguers

Are in their Poe-gothic chambers –

Ravens gone stealth,

Drapes slowly billowing,

While a malignancy of terror

Flutters through hallways and minds.

Beyond les fenêtres

The gloom-concealed fields –

the bogs and the heaths,

The forests and the streets –

Are vast.

Its hard to imagine all,

and harder still to manage it.

But duty remains

And the red-rimmed eye

Of sophistication, of brains,

Completes each assignment

Like a cram session

At a mad university.

Those at top levels

Want only As.

It's nothing personal that, in the chambers

of the mansion,

Those who flunked out

Are flayed,

Are burned,

And gouged.

For, after all, even in the library

The man in the velvet smoking jacket

Sadly ruminatively

Spinning the national globe,

Suffers too,

And wishes that you, dear prisoners,

Understand his pampering pain.

• Finn Harvor
  
  
  (Originally published in Former People; part of the Plastic Millennium project)