Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lighting they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Thomas Dylan Okay, time for some Carl Sandburg :) FORGOTTEN WARS Be loose. Be easy. Be ready. forget the last war. forget the one before. Forget the one yet to come. Be loose and easy about the wars whether they have been fought or whether yet to be fought- be ready to forget them. Who was saying at high noon today: "Is not each of them a forgotten war after it is fought and over? how and why it came forgotten? how and what it cost forgotten?" and was he there at Iwo Jima, Okinawa or places named Cassino, Anzio, the Bulge? and saying now: "Let the next war before it comes and before it gets under way and five or six day sees its finish or fifty years sees it still going strong -let it be now a forgotten war. Be ready now to forget it. Be loose, be easy now. The next war goes over in a flash-or runs long." GOD IS NO GENTLEMAN God gets up in the morning and says, "Another day?" God goes to work every day at regular hours. God is no gentleman for God puts on overalls and gets dirty running the universe we know about and several other universes nobody knows about but Him. HUNGER AND COLD Hunger long gone holds little heroic to the hungering. You don't eat and you get so you don't care to eat nor ever remember eating- and hearing of people who eat or don't eat is all the same to you when you've learned to keep your mind off eating and eaters. You become with enough hunger the same as a tree with sap long gone or a dry leaf ready to fall. Cold is cold and too cold is too cold. The colder you get the more numb you get and when you get numb enough you begin to feel snug and cozy with warmth. When the final numb glow of comfort goes through you, then comes your slow smooth slide into being frozen stiff and stark. Then comes your easy entry at the tall gates beyond which you are proof against ice or fire or tongues of malice or itch of ambition or any phase of the peculiar torment known as unrequited love. YEARS END Now winter downs the dying of the year, And night is all a settlement of snow; From the soft street the rooms of houses show A gethered light, a shapen atmosphere, Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin And still allows some stirring down within. I've known the wind by water banks to shake The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell And held in ice as dancers in a spell fluttered all winter long into a lake; Graved on the dark in gestures of descent, They seeked thier own most perfect monument. There was perfection in the death of ferns Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone A milliuon years. Great mammoths overthrown Composedly have made their great sojourns, Like palaces of patience, in the gray And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii The little dog lay curled and did not rise But slept the deeper as the ashes rose And found the pople incomplete, and froze The random hands, the loose unready eyes Of men expection yet another sun To do the shapely thing they had not done. These sudden ends of time must give us pause. We gray into the future, rarely wrought Save in tapestries of afterthought. More time, more time. Barrages of applause Come muffled from a burried radio. The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow. Richard Wilbur