A relevant poem by Rudyard Kipling

[phusion]

The Epitaph of a Dead Statesmen

"I could not dig; I dared not rob;
Therefore, I lied to please the mob.
Now, all my lies are proved untrue,
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?"
-Rudyard Kipling


Post your favorite poems!

[vixengrl]

1. "Musee des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden--one of my favorites.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I also like Fitzgerald's "The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam", but that's too long to post-- my favorite lines, though,

"The Moving Finger writes, and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it."

I'm just a real positive person, I guess.

[phusion]

2. That is excellent..thanks!

Very nice.
:)