Edwin Muir, 'The Horses'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs, no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, headed north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.

( The tractors lie about our fields; at evening )

by Edwin Muir

Ogden Nash, "Little Miss Muffet Sat on a Prophet and Quite Right, Too!"

[med_cat]

LITTLE MISS MUFFET SAT ON A PROPHET AND QUITE RIGHT, TOO!

I am sure that if anybody into the condition of humanity cares to probe,
Why they will agree with the prophet Job,
Because the prophet Job said that man is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble, that's what was said by the prophet Job,
And the truth of that statement can be confirmed by anybody who cares to probe.

So you would think that being born to trouble and woe, man would be satisfied,
And indeed that just by being born at all his passion for trouble would be gratisfied,
But is man content to leave bad enough alone?
Not so, he has to go out and create a lot more trouble and woe of his own.

Man knows very well that rheumatism and measles and ice and fog and pain and senility and sudden death are his for the asking,
and, indeed, his whether he asks for them or not,
But when it comes to agony, man is a glutton and a sot,
His appetite for punishment is immense,
And any torture that Nature overlooked, he invents.

There is no law of Nature that compels a man to drink too much,
Or even to think too much,
And when Nature looked at her handiwork, for purposes of her own she certainly added gender to it,
But she didn't order everybody to dive overboard and surrender to it,
Yes, it may have been Nature who induced two people to love each other and end up by marrying each other,
But it is their own idea when they begin to lovingly torment and harry each other.

And it may have been Nature who developed the mosquito and the gnat and the midge,
But man developed golf and bridge,
And Nature may have thought up centipedes and ants,
But man all by himself thought up finance,
So this prophet will utter just one utterance instead of uttering them like the prophet Job in baker's twelves,

Which utterance is that people could survive their natural trouble all right if it weren't for the trouble they make for themselves.

(Ogden Nash)