Prayer New York and Jeffers

PRAYER FOR A GOOD DEATH:

Great Spirit, I am unworthy;
My species has disgraced itself.
Of all the species that live, or have ever lived,
Mine is the lowliest.
Lower than the flowers who fill the air with sweet pollen,
Lower than the trees who encircle the Earth with their roots,
Lower than the insects, rulers of Earth
Since the beginning of time, lower than the darting fish,
Lower than the soaring birds,
Lower than the four-legged creatures,
Who are the beating heart of the living Earth.

Great Spirit, my shame is as deep as the ocean,
And my sadness is unbearable.
I pray for enlightenment,
But fear that my prayer is too late.
Great Spirit, if this be so, then I pray for extinction.
Let my species become extinct, and vanish from the Earth.
Let my loins be barren,
Let my seed not sprout,
Let the race of men fall like leaves.
Let my fields grow wild,
Let my fences crumble,
Let my cities turn to dust, and become forests.
Let the grass drink my blood;
Let my body be food for worms.
Great Spirit, let me die, that the Earth may live.

- Rev Chris Korda


NEW YORK

(Office and Attack)

TO FERNANDO VELA

Beneath all the statistics
there is a drop of duck’s blood.
Beneath all the columns
there is a drop of sailor’s blood.
Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood;
a river that goes singing,
past the bedrooms of the suburbs,
and the river is silver, cement, or wind
in the lying daybreak of New York.
The mountains exist, I know that.
And the lenses ground for wisdom,
I know that. But I have not come to see the sky,
the blood that sweeps the machines to the waterfalls,
and the spirit on the cobra’s tongue.
Every day they kill in New York
ducks, four million,
pigs, five million,
pigeons, two thousand, for the enjoyment of dying men,
cows, one million,
lambs, one million,
roosters, two million,
who turn the sky to small splinters.
You may as well sob filing a razor blade
or assassinate dogs in the hallucinated foxhunts,
as try to stop in the dawnlight
the endless trains carrying milk,
the endless trains carrying blood,
and the trains carrying roses in chains
for those in the field of perfume.
The ducks and the pigeons
and the hogs and the lambs
lay their drops of blood down
underneath all the statistics;
and the terrible bawling of the packed-in cattle
fills the valley with suffering
where the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.
I attack all those persons
who know nothing of the other half,
the half who cannot be saved,
who raise their cement mountains,
in which the hearts of the small
animals no one thinks of are beating,
and from which we will all fall
during the final holiday of the drills.
I spit in your face.
The other half hears me,
as they go on eating, urinating, flying in their purity
like the children of janitors
who carry delicate sticks
to the holes where the antennas
of the insects are rusting.
This is not hell, it is a street.
This is not death, it is a fruit-stand.
There is a whole world of crushed rivers and unachievable distances
in the paw of a cat crushed by a car,
and I hear the song of the worm
in the heart of so many girls.
Rust, rotting, trembling earth.
And you are earth, swimming through the figures of the office.
What shall I do, set my landscapes in order?
Set in place the lovers who will afterwards be photographs,
Who will be bits of wood and mouthfuls of blood?
No, I won’t; I attack,
I attack the conspiring
of these empty offices
that will not broadcast the sufferings,
that rub out the plans of the forest,
and I offer myself to be eaten by the packed-up cattle
when their mooing fills the valley
where the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.

- Federico García Lorca


PEOPLE AND A HERON

A desert of weed and water-darkened stone under my western windows
The ebb lasted all afternoon, 

And many pieces of humanity, men, women, and children, gathering shellfish, 

Swarmed with voices of gulls the sea-breach. 

At twilight they went off together, the verge was left vacant, an evening heron 

Bent broad wings over the black ebb, 

And left me wondering why a lone bird was dearer to me than many people. 

Well: rare is dear: but also I suppose 

Well reconciled with the world but not with our own natures we grudge to see them 

Reflected on the world for a mirror.


PASSENGER PIGEON

Slowly the passenger pigeons increased, then suddenly their numbers
Became enormous, they would flatten ten miles of forest
When they flew down to roost, and the cloud of their rising
Eclipsed the dawns. They became too many, they are all dead
Not one remains.

And the American bison: their hordes
Would hide a prairie from horizon to horizon, great heads and storm-cloud shoulders, a torrent of life -
How many are left? For a time, for a few years, their bones
Turned the dark prairies white.

You, Death, you watch for these things.
These explosions of life: they are your food.
They make your feasts.

But turn your great rolling eyes away from humanity
Those grossly craving black eyes. It is true we increase.
A man from Britain landing in Gaul when Rome had fallen
He journeyed fourteen days inland through that beautiful
Rich land, the orchards and rivers and the looted villas: he reports he saw
No living man. But now we fill the gaps.
In spite of wars, famines and pestilences we are quite suddenly
Three billion people: our bones, ours too, would make
Wide prairies white, a beautiful snow of unburied bones:
Bones that have twitched and quivered in the nights of love,
Bones that have shaken with laughter and hung slack in sorrow, coward bones
Worn out with trembling, strong bones broken on the rack, bones broken in battle,
Broad bones gnarled with hard labor, and the little bones of sweet young children, and the white empty skulls,
Little carved ivory wine-jugs that used to contain
Passion and thought and love and insane delirium, where now
Not even worms live

Respect humanity, Death, these shameless black eyes of yours,
It is not necessary to take all at once - besides that you cannot do it, we are too powerful,
We are men, not pigeons; you may take the old, the useless and helpless, the cancer-bitten and the tender young,
But the human race has still history to make. For look - look now
At our achievements: we have bridled the cloud-leaper lightning, a lion whipped by a man, to carry our messages
And work our will, we have snatched the thunderbolt
Out of God's hands. Ha? That was little and last year - for now we have taken
The primal powers, creation and annihilation; we make new elements, such as God never saw,
We can explode atoms and annul the fragments, nothing left but pure energy, we shall use it
In peace and war - "Very clever," he answered in his thin piping voice,
Cruel and a eunuch.

Roll those idiot black eyes of yours
On the field-beats, not on intelligent man,
We are not in your order. You watched the dinosaurs
Grow into horror: they had been little elves in the ditches and presently became enormous with leaping flanks
And tearing teeth, plated with armor, nothing could stand against them, nothing but you,
Death, and they died. You watched the sabre-tooth tigers
Develop those huge fangs, unnecessary as our sciences, and presently they died. You have their bones
In the oil-pits and layer rock, you will not have ours. With pain and wonder and labor we have bought intelligence.
We have minds like the tusks of those forgotten tigers, hypertrophied and terrible,
We have counted the stars and half-understood them, we have watched the farther galaxies fleeing away from us, wild herds
Of panic horses - or a trick of distance deceived by the prism - we outfly falcons and eagles and meteors,
Faster than sound, higher than the nourishing air; we have enormous privilege, we do not fear you,
We have invented the jet-plane and the death-bomb and the cross of Christ - "Oh," he said, "surely
You'll live forever" - grinning like a skull, covering his mouth with his hand - "What could exterminate you?"


ORIGINAL SIN

The man-brained and man-handed ground-ape physically
The most repulsive of all hot-blooded animals
Up to that time of the world: they had dug a pitfall
And caught a mammoth, but how could their sticks and stones
Reach the life in that hide? They danced around the pit, shrieking
With ape excitement, flinging sharp flints in vain, and the stench of their bodies
Stained the white air of dawn; but presently one of them
Remembered the yellow dancer, wood-eating fire
That guards the cave-mouth: he ran and fetched him, and others
Gathered sticks at the wood's edge; they made a blaze
And pushed it into the pit, and they fed it high, around the mired sides
Of their huge prey. They watched the long hairy trunk
Waver over the stifle-trumpeting pain,
And they were happy.

Meanwhile the intense color and nobility of sunrise
Rose and gold and amber, flowed up the sky. Wet rocks were shining, a little wind
Stirred the leaves of the forest and the marsh flag-flowers; the soft valley between the low hills
Became as beautiful as the sky; while in its midst, hour after hour, the happy hunters
Roasted their living meat slowly to death.

These are the people.
This is the human dawn. As for me I would rather
Be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.
But we are what we are, and we might remember
Not to hate any person, for all are vicious;
And not be astonished at any evil, all are deserved;
And not fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.


VULTURE

I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up in heaven,
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing, I understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer.
I could see the naked red head between the great wings
Bear downward staring. I said, "My dear bird, we are wasting time here.
These old bones will still work; they are not for you." But how beautiful he looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the sea-light over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes--
What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment; What a life after death.

- Robinson Jeffers