we stayed up all night taking truth serum


victor vasarely, opus 2604

A Birthday Poem
-- Ted Kooser

Just past dawn, the sun stands
with its heavy red head
in a black stanchion of trees,
waiting for someone to come
with his bucket
for the foamy white light,
and then a long day in the pasture.
I too spend my days grazing,
feasting on every green moment
till darkness calls,
and with the others
I walk away into the night,
swinging the little tin bell
of my name.

History
-- Robert Lowell

History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had--
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.
Abel was finished; death is not remote,
a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,
his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,
his baby crying all night like a new machine.
As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory,
the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter's moon ascends--
a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes,
my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull's no-nose--
O there's a terrifying innocence in my face
drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.

Pledge
--klipschutz

The undersigned shall not depict the Prophet
in a proscribed idolatrous manner.
Make that not at all. In this regard,
the tenets of our beliefs and/or religions,
or the values of our cultures, or our countries,
shall not guide our actions,
but rather the dictates of your faith
and that alone. In turn,
you have agreed to withdraw
the threat of death and not
to put to torch another building
that functions as a symbol
of any European nation
whose individual citizens
have insulted your truth.
We shall sin no more, and cherish
the Death to America sash
which seals this sacred pact.
It is lovely, truly lovely,
beyond words.

* "I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul. It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!" - Henry Miller (1934)