"A Human Fly"

velvet I sitevelvet I site Posts: 192
edited January 2006 in Poetry, Prose, Music & Art
Crowds, streetcars stopped--is it a demonstration?
In the city of Oakland, in the year 1919?
All of them, obviously, in hats, looking up.
No, not at a speaker. It is a human fly
Who climbs vertically the wall of a building.

O miserable human fly, arms spread aloft,
You move inch by inch, testing a handhold.
And below, those hats. Will he fall? Or make it?

They stand in the photograph, lovers of plebeian games,
Of matches in a ring, acrobatics under the tent of a wandering circus,
Of catch-as-catch-can, of blood in the arena.
I am not a lover of mankind, though I pretended,
As if my tender skin, my fastidiousness were not against.

--But these here, hot-blooded, how many eyes,
Muscles, varieties of chin, shapes of lips,
All must be dead.
They are shadows, no more.

--And it is just that such a short existence had been their store.

~Czeslaw Milosz.


*this is not how i feel... i am a lover of mankind, just as i love myself: critically. such a wonderful piece though... someday i should hope to be able to write as this... but much travelling is first required, and much money for that...

i hope you enjoy the poetry.
change begins with discontent.
Post edited by Unknown User on

Comments

  • I picture Ed, as he wishes--
    'an empthy cup in the middle of the sea'--
    and I say, 'I want to be there too';

    I hear Ed, as he dishes--
    'discarding all thought'--
    and i think, 'I want to rain too';

    thus I write--
    that I just might--
    be the one to be in U.
    i'm a thief... and a liar...

    see Ed's church?--he's breathing fire.....
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