Tramping through this preserve of emperors, allowing it its quiet-times only at nightfall, what do we assert? A strange democracy? –As if in some middling wood we await expectantly the return of kings who may never come. But gript by piety, else holding tight to a line linking to past pieties, or hoping that hope in history is piety enough, or practicing reverence with the occasional electrical worship of the present instant, we wait. But Hitler had his blueprints as well, working with them to the end. Who doesn’t. This poem is my blueprint–blank till I sketch a first small suggestive design in pen here between the phrases, and ask the reader or passerby to draw also, to imaginatively doodle, to add. Then, pass this day-poem along to others and it might becomes a complete set of drawings, public petition for a newer city which is practical, less elusive, less remote.
A pdf with words (in Chinese)
and the tune (modified for two voices...)
[public domain if written credit is given (P.Kragt) for commercial use]
When ducks arrive in the city it may be under duress, and all unprepared for city tastes or city etiquette; These have not each been asked for their consideration. When artists commute from the countryside F complaining of meagre result, rural simplicity, spotty esteem; neither (perhaps) have those been petitioned for preference. When the lone scribe returns to his country under foreign decree-To rebuild, to replace some walls and re-make what was; Little as well might he/she relish that opportunity.
One lonely robin waits dissolution of snowfall as we anticipate another political season. In winter they assemble in large flocks at night, in Canada no doubt, but here with civic vest, with civil etiquette the robin has a regular welcome won upon our level greens. Other dinosaur descendants must flit, yet, and hop from our right-of-way (as lesser mammals fled in turn at the tramp of raptors) but she need not scurry at all. Might I predict a day- scenting the dry and balmy breezes of a summer afternoon, tired of its subterranean toil, when one overly lugubrious earthworm, wishing but to take in a little sun amid a forest of close-kept American grasses, shall find itself, too late, as a trophy; fodder to the new iteration of robin. Why is it that sportsmen employ the robin as mascot so seldom unless it is inappropriate to limit a living myth so..?
The solitary starling passed me on my left hurriedly searching for a twilight roost; else a recent convert to Americanism, he/she changed now, aligned with human values, separate from its flock yet indistinguishable from the rest.