I do so often wonder

Shine, perishing republic

Thomas Hart Benton's "Indifference"

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
      heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops
      and sighs out, and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make
      fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances,
      ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life
      is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than
      mountains; shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their
      distance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, and when the cities lie at the
      monster’s feet there are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,
      a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught
      —they say—God, when he walked on earth.
~ Robinson Jeffers

The Answer

Then what is the answer?—Not to be deluded by dreams.
 To know that great civilizations have broken down into
      violence, and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or
      choose the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
      and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams
      will not be fulfilled.
To know this, and to know that however ugly the parts
      appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and
      stars and his history...for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
      the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the
      divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful
      confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.
             ~ Robinson Jeffers

Strange

There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free—
what you relied upon as ground-rule and as rite
looks upside down from how it used to be.

Skin’s gone pale, your brain is shedding cells;
you question every tenet you set down;
obedient thoughts have turned to infidels
and every verb desires to be a noun.
                             * * * *
How many people thought you’d never change?
But here you have. It’s beautiful. It’s strange.
            ~ Kate Light

Dreaming of the Future

The future that never happens
is the one that makes us do
what we do while we are waiting
for what is never going to come
to take us away from the past,
which is a country that we do not
know anymore, where the language
is strange, only almost familiar.
Years not only go by, they carry us
into places where we meet the dragons,
the gorgons, the pack of wolves
circling with their sharp teeth, and
sometimes we lift a candle, sometimes curse.
Like scarecrows, we scare a bird or two.
We know what we are and are not.
But still we keep on dreaming, warming
our hands over the fire in that cottage
at the end of the road—where everything
is prepared for us, and someone we
never met has departed only minutes ago.

“A Dream of the Future” by Joyce Sutphen from The Green House.