From "Untitled (DARKWALKING ENDLESSLY)":
THE GREAT ROSE OF TIME TURNS SLOWLY.
THE DREAM FLOWN ON WINGS OF SILVER BELLS, BEYOND HARPOONS
AND SCREECH OWL,
GONE FAR ON BEYOND BEYOND.
THE DREAM IS ON THE HEIGHTS AND RISING.
And here's the end of "Untitled (DARKWALKING ENDLESSLY)":
THE GREAT ROSE OF TIME TURNS SLOWLY.
THE DREAM FLOWN ON WINGS OF SILVER BELLS, BEYOND HARPOONS AND SCREECH OWL,
GONE FAR ON BEYOND BEYOND.
THE DREAM IS ON THE HEIGHTS AND RISING.
Celebrating the centennial of incandescent poets' poet BOB KAUFMAN (b. 4/18/1925). I've tucked a sample in the first comment.
I learned this week that you can put our troops' lives in danger, compromise our national security, and violate the Espionage Act. And the government will do nothing.
But if you write an editorial for your school newspaper that Trump doesn't like, you will be abducted on the street and disappeared.
"When this optimism is not qualified to accord with the real and complex facts of human nature and history, there is always a danger that sentimentality will give way to despair and that a too consistent optimism will alternate with a too consistent pessimism.”
“The consistent optimism of our liberal culture has prevented modern democratic societies both from gauging the perils of freedom accurately and from appreciating democracy fully as the only alternative to injustice and oppression.
"...a too consistent optimism in regard to man’s ability and inclination to grant justice to his fellows obscures the perils of chaos.... If these perils are not appreciated they may overtake a free society and invite the alternative evil of tyranny.
"The excessively optimistic estimates of human nature and of human history... are a source of peril to democratic society; for contemporary experience is refuting this optimism and there is danger that it will seem to refute the democratic ideal as well.
Found this among my Dad's books (looks like 1st edition): "The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness" by Reinhold Niebuhr, from 1944 (yes, pre-inclusive language). Oh man. A chunk of the Foreword is in comments section; he's just getting warmed up....
If i can't be an ugly rumor i won't be the good time had by all.
- Bob Kaufman
