(untitled first draft)
Monday, 18 May 2009 10:28![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammerAs ranchers hold their spreads by riding them;
As teachers grow their students by their teaching,
Not what is taught; as gardeners learn from stem
And bud and bloom and root and leaf sun-reaching
What plants can make of them, and what they are;
As an astronomer expands by seeing
A fast old galaxy or new still star;
As rangers find that blazing trails is freeing;
As clowns behold the truth in the absurd;
As police hold the law, and lawyers take it;
As writers build a world inside each word;
As forgers make art even as they fake it;
As we can only be by what we do --
So let us make ourselves, and make us new.
---L.
As teachers grow their students by their teaching,
Not what is taught; as gardeners learn from stem
And bud and bloom and root and leaf sun-reaching
What plants can make of them, and what they are;
As an astronomer expands by seeing
A fast old galaxy or new still star;
As rangers find that blazing trails is freeing;
As clowns behold the truth in the absurd;
As police hold the law, and lawyers take it;
As writers build a world inside each word;
As forgers make art even as they fake it;
As we can only be by what we do --
So let us make ourselves, and make us new.
—16 May 2009
I can safely call this the first thing I've written so completely influenced by Louis MacNeice. I'm not pleased with the regularity of the third quatrain, and while the order is correct for the argument, the rhetorical structure wants to swap writers and clowns -- logic and imagery should pull in tandem, darn it. Still, not bad for a lightly corrected first draft.---L.