Written by
Allen Ginsberg |
Oil brown smog over Denver
Oil red dung colored smoke
level to level across the horizon
blue tainted sky above
Oil car smog gasoline
hazing red Denver's day
December bare trees
sticking up from housetop streets
Plane lands rumbling, planes rise over
radar wheels, black smoke
drifts from tailfins
Oil millions of cars speeding the cracked plains
Oil from Texas, Bahrein, Venezuela Mexico
Oil that turns General Motors
revs up Ford
lights up General Electric, oil that crackles
thru International Business Machine computers,
charges dynamos for ITT
sparks Western
Electric
runs thru Amer Telephone & Telegraph wires
Oil that flows thru Exxon New Jersey hoses,
rings in Mobil gas tank cranks, rumbles
Chrysler engines
shoots thru Texaco pipelines
blackens ocean from broken Gulf tankers
spills onto Santa Barbara beaches from
Standard of California derricks offshore.
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Written by
Mark Doty |
Long Pont's apparitional
this warm spring morning,
the strand a blur of sandy light,
and the square white
of the lighthouse-separated from us
by the bay's ultramarine
as if it were nowhere
we could ever go-gleams
like a tower's ghost, hazing
into the rinsed blue of March,
our last outpost in the huge
indetermination of sea.
It seems cheerful enough,
in the strengthening sunlight,
fixed point accompanying our walk
along the shore. Sometimes I think
it's the where-we-will be,
only not yet, like some visible outcropping
of the afterlife. In the dark
its deeper invitations emerge:
green witness at night's end,
flickering margin of horizon,
marker of safety and limit.
but limitless, the way it calls us,
and where it seems to want us
to come, And so I invite it
into the poem, to speak,
and the lighthouse says:
Here is the world you asked for,
gorgeous and opportune,
here is nine o'clock, harbor-wide,
and a glinting code: promise and warning.
The morning's the size of heaven.
What will you do with it?
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