Editor’s Note: What better way to start off the new year with a timely poem by our Poet Laureate, Ian McLeod? Consider your past as you look to the future. We wish you a very, very happy new year, as we reclaim Western Culture.
The Sea calls,
doesn’t She?
She calls
and I fall
fall deep into the
Laurentian Abyssal
near the Continental
Plains where so many
aeroplanes and ships
are lost.
Lost, just because.
I’ll swim to the Marianas
beneath Nothing Atoll,
I mean, Bikini, Bikini Atoll:
what’s left after The Bomb.
The Bomb, The Bomb,
all-consuming like the tongue’s fire;
a bitter draught of poison, ire,
contempt, regret.
I remember that day, the day
of the end. It was all supposed to.
I liked it that way: history tied up neatly with
a pretty red bow.
“A thousand more years
of the same old crap,”
as Chung said.
And just as Mankind must suffer,
so must I.
Being a part of it
and all.
Ten years hence, will I say “Ten years thence,
I was here on such-and-such day
talking to so-and-so
listening to them talk about what-was-that
and commiserating with the Roasted Swan,
the one sung of in the Songs of Buren”?
“Misery! Misery! How charred I am,
and thoroughly roasted!”
My translation is made politically correct
for your mental protection.
A prophylactic against forbidden thoughts.
Were I a slave to the aesthetic,
the roastedness
would bother me.
I could be resigned,
consigned to forever being roasted,
and that roastedness would henceforth be my lot.
Or maybe, despite my present roastedness,
I could believe in a non-roasted future.
Not just believe, but know it,
know it down to my marrow.
Encore une Verre.
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