POEMS
Yet nave I known the South?
A scene
Night and forgetfulness cannot dispel
Is less kind
And gloves my mind with fear and foreboding;
No haze curtains the road
Where death with such insistence strews
Violence ·among stray and homeless beasts.
Terrible emblem of some rot within,
Printed a thousand·fold,
The South wears
This casual knotted mass of blood and fur,
Known only to the carrion rain and sun.
Edouard Roditi
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD
Bergson, who knew best why we laugh,
Now laughs in peace, but not as we.
He timed the ticking of his soul,
Predictable as any clock,
Till death within him, like a time-bomb,
Exploded just when his known world
-A needed dream where he had lived–
Vanished, no longer needing him.
Freud too, to whom all history
Was simple as one dreamer's dream,
Saw this vast dreamer suddenly
Rise in a paranoiac fit
To force its folly on the world.
Exiled as reason, Freud soon died.
And we, who now by clocks and laws
Of this dark nightmare yet must live,
479
