To Accidie

Accidie, my mother, when shall I be born?

A thousand times I have lain down in your black swamp, desireless; not death, but the mud of a perpetual shame. Whole days I have wandered in your autumnal city, blinded by arid fogs, menaced by that dome of riveted steel on which sunrise and sunset are painted.

I – who love more than anything else the swarthy strength of miners, the brown faces and vivid speech of foreign seamen, the blazing noonday that melts down asphalt – action.

I am condemned to be dumb; or else the intolerable polar night that splinters ornate windows, volcanic explosion from the water of a moon mountain.

Yet I am at heart bourgeois, admiring flowers and cats and sentimental poems. Can this be reconciled?

Though I have died many times, I am not yet born. Accidie, your festering body is dearer to me thou that of any woman. Desire irritates; beauty wounds, clarity would destroy me.

Who shall administer justice? That purple abscess, the judge on the bench? What surgeon has clean hands? This is morality: You are free to do as you please.

Saints or jailors, do not lay hands on me. I have never accepted your laws. I know my own kind by their fresh faces, easy manners and despised of authority. You say: Ambition. I say: Bread.

1948 (26)

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