Ted's weird enough in the Senate

      I shouldn't 

      like to run 

      into him in 

      his atelier.

not forgetting

..                   

                      release in me

the secret purpose I tasted deeply outside time,

           so that I may love, may love

beyond human images and all created things, beyond the single

        pulse that throbs inside me,

one now for the living and the dead; grant me,

         grant me deliverance,

to feel again the uncreated Eros

           filling my breast,

and to be to all, to things near and far away

          as the wind's sound and breath.

Angelos Sikelianos

Selected Poems

  Prayer [fragment]

Edmund Keeley and

  Philip Sherrard, translation

op. cit.

ii Valéry Lorenzo

Racines

  from a series

new book in print

Patrick Leigh-Fermor's literary

executors have consummated his

agreement with John Murray, pub-

lishers, to bring to life a final

travel memoir, and Heywood Hill

have begun to ship it. Everyone

probably already knows. Good.

There's a country in the world that keeps wanting us to go to war

         On a better-late-than-never

         reading of history, a nation

         we all favour commends war

         to us routinely, and has en-

         trapped three generations of

         our people in a neurotic re-

         flex. Well, with so many such

         dependencies - Wall Street,

         the South, the sugar lobby -

         it seems discriminatory to

         isolate an amiable national

         chum, for corrupting our pol-

         itics and tethering us as its

         own judas goat. 

         War is different from subsid-

         ies and tax breaks, deregula-

         tion and rigged elections. We

         indulge such habits because

         our oligarchs insist. But war

         takes youth who are gone from

         us, when they are gone. That

         vile choice is for the humble

         to deliberate. It would be

         more in the interest of this

         nation to see such people in

         office again, than to do an-

         other dependent the favour of

         a war.

       

         But we have our own nemeses
         to thank for being friends
         like these, who think nothing
         of donating our youth to be
         chopped up in these charitable
         cauldrons, and yet blanch at
         ceding a crumb from our table
         in economic assistance. Even
         they, however, would have no
         platform for debauching our de-
         bates without that galaxy of
         warmongering columnists clus-
         tered at The Washington Post,
         outriders of a decadently im-
         perious editorial board, who 
         speculate openly and weekly 
         on whose society to punish, 
         whose to destabilise, thwart, 
         toy with, as Caligula teased 
         his beasts. As Connie Corleone
         warned Kay, O, read the papers,
         read the papers!

         Who can doubt, how absolute-
         ly normal this can seem, by
         now, to be suspended in an
         isometric pump of hegemony
         because of the power to de-
         fine the terms. We have met
         that country, and it is us.

         Just sayin'.