Poetry

As I was pondering

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring

The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:

The Bird of Time has but a little way

To fly---and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

I was reminded of Marvell (OK, I know, does it help if the first piece of Marvell I read (also this one) was because of a header in an Ursula K LeGuin story, "Vaster than empires and more slow"?), and when searching for the words delighted to discover that the top google hit for "through the iron gates of life" is... me in a former life. Well it beats rano's in the bidet¹ :-)

It looks like I've since returned to the topic, which is my excuse for bringing up the utterly superb The Gods of the Copybook Headings: That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire. But perhaps better for these times of the Downfall of Capitalism:

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn

That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:

But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,

So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind...

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

Livejournal, incidentally, handles the blockquotes better.

1. Coming back to this in 2015 I discover I haven't got a clue what I meant by that.