Classic Poem

You almost wish they weren't there
sometimes, those peace-pirates or Mad
Mercyists you can't place either
with the terror or the counter-terror,
with the violent or the inert;
in fact can't place anywhere
outside of La Mancha
or the Mount of Olives. I swear
sometimes I'd rather be left,
like Richard in the play, to " that
sweet way I was in to despair " ,
seeing the end coming, seeing
five billion of anything nec-
essitous as men are
couldn't help conquering the world; seeing
how history, all unaware,
headed for this and it's here —
the sea-beaches blackened with dead
dolphins and pelagic birds;
disaster at Bhopal, the Rhine,
Chernobyl, the Three-Mile-Island,
the Love Canal. . . .

Ah love ,
let us be true to one another . . . . Ah,
more, even: obsessed, oblivious
to the rest that we can't bear!

And still, those ridiculous
" far-distant, storm-beaten ships ... "
No, not those of old Mahan,
looming between the Grande Armee
and the dominion of the world,
but little one-lungers that bob
on a bilge-pump and a prayer
between the harpoons and the whales,
and between the ocean itself
and a sea-fill, a sewer — and at last
between history-as-horror and
history as honor. . . . Ah, love,
what could we, even,
promise to one another,
if they weren't there?