lovely

"It seems illiterate solitude

Is the first place where the true and the good

Awaken in us.

The later freedom we call leisure

Cannot supply that buried treasure

Which is the basis and the measure

of personalities

And which we name imagination,

A word I cite with much elation

And some unease

Because it can sound slight and airy

An entry in the dictionary,

A bubble word. Yet while I’m wary

I realize

I still want to declare its great

Sustaining force, early and late,

From youth to age.

It does not just mean fancy thoughts.

Accountants, lawyers, graduates

In medicine, as well as poets

Using language —

All need its salutary power.

All men and women must beware

Who would deny it

And go against their childhood’s grain

And dry up like earth parched for rain.

They’ll grow mechanical and then

No drug or diet

No health-farm, clinic, yoga course

No mantra om, no Star Wars force

Will compensate

For what is lost when the mind divides.

Even science now concedes

The brain has two conjugal sides,

The left and right.

To have to marry intuition

To the analytic reason

For psychic balance.

Head sleeps with heart, begets a creature

Free yet cornered in its nature.

To be your whole self, you must mate your

Brains and glands.

So scholarship and art must be

Fragrant with personality

And moral feeling.

Distinction’s not an ego-trip.

Good luck helps many to the top

Yet once up there you can still slip

And keep on falling.

Everything flows, an old Greek said.

Nothing’s secure. Gold’s only lead

When you stop to think.

On your way up, show consideration

To the ones you meet on their way down.

The Latin root of condescension

Means we all sink.

Let self-will be anathema.

Let the hierarchy and Mafia

Join hand in glove

To doom and excommunicate

Whoever’s not compassionate,

Whoever will not contemplate

The world through love."