splendid in sentiment, image, form & especially sonics. thanks
KS
On 10/12/06, Jon Corelis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Remember, imbeciles and wits
>
> by Basil Bunting/Francois Villon
>
> Remember, imbeciles and wits,
> sots and ascetics, fair and foul,
> young girls with little tender tits,
> that DEATH is written over all.
>
> Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul
> they are so rotten, old and thin,
> or firm and soft and warm and full --
> fellmonger Death gets every skin.
>
> All that is piteous, all that's fair,
> all that is fat and scant of breath,
> Elisha's baldness, Helen's hair,
> is Death's collateral:
>
> Three score and ten years after sight
> of this pay me your pulse and breath
> value received. And who dare cite,
> as we forgive our debtors, Death?
>
> Abelard and Eloise,
> Henry the Fowler, Charlemagne,
> Genee, Lopokova, all these
> die, die in pain.
>
> And General Grant and General Lee,
> Patti and Florence Nightingale,
> like Tyro and Antiope
> drift among ghosts in Hell,
>
> know nothing, are nothing, save a fume
> driving across a mind
> preoccupied with this: our doom
> is, to be sifted by the wind,
>
> heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands
> We are less permanent than thought.
> The Emperor with the Golden Hands
> is still a word, a tint, a tone,
> insubstantial-glorious,
> when we ourselves are dead and gone
> and the green grass growing over us.
>
>
>
> --
> ===================================
>
> Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/jgcorelis/
>
> ===================================
>
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