Because I am blind and walk agape And beat out rough rhythm with my stick Like the fascination of the sea I can create, as in Yeats' dream, Man in the soul of God And batter out a place Among twilit immensities To dwell in that contempt, Giving bitterness a face. Stick, stick, stick, stick. Because I am a blind old man And came blindly howling hence To fumble with a stick, I demand, Passion of my decrepitude unsung, A gallery where bright heroes hung Stand each for that passion That pitched them to their deaths; And I demand it built Behind the eye and in the heart Of God and his burning son; All glory in the uneaten bud. Stick, stick, stick, stick. I have heard on the walks and ways That give my confession to a stone That some with bitter inward breaths And some in necessity of fashion Live slave to what words have wrung Out of man's contemptible mash And nail to each star each part, As if misery made flesh were all. Stick, stick, stick, stick. I can see because I am blind How each tiresome human vine In eyeless arrogance of its kind Sprouts like a worm in its own food, Divine soul all lumped with mud. Each blind root heaves its back to the sun In perilous ignorance of its own blood. Stick, stick, stick, stick. Although I am blind and cannot see Bleak wreckage of the dark tide, Rank human ecstasies and defeats, I know what mysteries abide And carve these rude words upon my stick: We must feed what we beget; Imagination shall provide Some unsought froth as yet, rank spillage Of the glittering sublime. Stick, stick, stick, stick.
The Blind Man
[Poetry], Unimagined Things
Comments Off on The Blind Man
Aug 272011