POEMS
If
you can wake up in the morning early,
if you can teach yourself to catch the train,
if you can hang out everything for sale,
if you can say, "I am a man,
I can sell asphalt off the street,
I can sell snowbright
dead women gleaming through shop windows,
or diamond horseshoe naked dancing girls,
or eight hours on my feet,
or twenty years of talk in telephones,
or fifty years behind a desk"-
you need not fail.
If
you are strong as I am, you can hear
yourself talking to yourself at night
until your hair turns gray:
"I am God's white-haired boy,
I almost love the way I sell
my lips, my blood, my heart: and leave them there,
and no one else can sell such pity and such glory,
such light, such hope
even down to the last magnificent,
half-forgotten love affair."
Perhaps only I can do it as it should be done,
selling what remains, yet knowing that a last
day will come and a last half-hour,
or five minutes left impossible to sell,
the last more valuable than all the rest.
Louis MacNeice
THE PREACHER
He carried a ball of darkness with him, unrolled it
To find his way by in streets and rooms;
Every train or boat he took was Charon's ferry,
He never left the Catacombs;
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