in their red and white morse the old old
messages as if nothing had happened. Again
consider trees. My God the impresario
trees. Just try, Sir, just try to cut one down
in Fitzjohn's Avenue at three o'clock
in the ordinary afternoon. You will be
prosecuted. Soon the Householders will arrange
themselves into a deranged mob. They'll grow
Hitler mustaches, Mussolini chins. Frightful,
and write oathy letters to the Council,
naming you
tree-criminal.
Yet tell me, when
the bombs met their shadows in London,
amidst the ruins of voices, did one tree, just one
tree write an angry note in its sly green ink?
No, they only dropped faded tears in autumn
selfishly thinking of their own hamadryads. . .
BUSINESS AS USUAL was and is their trite
slogan. Away then with trees and roses.
They are inhuman. Away also with rivers:
The disgusting Ganges bleeding from Brahma's
big toe; the Rubicon cause of a Civil War;
the Acheron, River of Sorrows-Tiber that drowned
Horatius the One-Eyed, the sweating Rhone,
Rhine, Don, and the vulgar Volga, not to
mention the garrulous Mississippi with its
blatant river-smell. Even the English
rivers can do no more than reflect inverted
values, turn chaste swans upside down
like so many flies on the roof of the waters.
Swans however,
cannot
swim upside down.
At least I have never seen them. Is this distortion
of truth deliberate? Has ever one river,
one river, Sir, written eulogies of waterfalls
to plead for the reprieve of Mankind? And stars,
so indifferent and delinquent, stars which we have
decorated with glittering adjectives more numerous
than those bestowed on Helen's eyes-do they
