Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн

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“Meanwhile we, your children,

Weeping in our seasick zoo of windows while you dance,

Will gobble aspirins,

And try to keep our cage from caving in.

All the while our minds will fill with these petitions,

Flowering quietly in between our gongs of pulse.

These will have to serve as prayers:

“‘O lock us in the safe jails of thy movies!

Confine us to the semiprivate wards and white asylums

Of the unbearable cocktail parties, O New York!

Sentence us for life to the penitentiaries of thy bars and nightclubs,

And leave us stupefied forever by the blue, objective lights

That fill the pale infirmaries of thy restaurants,

And the clinics of thy schools and offices,

And the operating-rooms of thy dance-halls.

“‘But never give us any explanations, even when we ask,

Why all our food tastes of iodoform,

And even the freshest flowers smell of funerals.

No, never let us look about us long enough to wonder

Which of the rich men, shivering in the overheated office,

And which of the poor men, sleeping face-down on the Daily Mirror,