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To Amangle Debelsh

I'm not constrained to say by word or look

The poems that I write are gleaned by stealth

From lexicons or from another's book,

Though literature is mankind's common wealth.

Emotion resurrected from the grave

But personates a ruddy-featured health

And, like Socratic prisoners in the cave; Grasps vainly at the passing shadow-show, Nor magnifies the intellectual knave.

What I have seen and felt, and what I know, Demands precisioned language and a form Beyond established limits. Will thought grow

If grafted to some ancient, sapless corm? What poet yet entrapped his pulsing mind Within the steelmesh shackles of a norm?

Or called the tribal tom-toms in to grind Accepted versions of his winging song? Not scorn nor pleading shall my vision bind,

Nor shall the feeble heart impede the strong With catch-call epithets and outcry shrill For easy thoughts and feelings that belong

To Philistinic morons. From the swill Of custom's many troughs the pigling swallows The mush that fattens him towards the kill,

And in well-trampled bogs the old sow wallows And farrows there her pleasure-rooting race, Which propagates again and blindly follows.

But I shall paint again the universal face In planes and pigments of mine own devising, Nor strive to emulate recorded grace,

Nor cease in fear my caustic improvising Because a mental eunuch twitters, "Crime!"; Nor shall I stay my drastic cauterizing

Of all the weeping ulcers of our time To gain the drooping cripple-wit's approval With metre's wheel-chair and the crutch of rime.

For I am here to implement removal Of fear and greed and war and fostered hate;

The lashing thong of reason's sharp reproval,

The stinging gadfly of the modern state.

—Bruce McLeod.