Monday, August 28, 2017

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)

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