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After Reading "A Poet Tells Us How to Be Masters of the Machine" by W.H. Auden

Static of definite extinction, to whom are We allied?

If it is to Your noise, Your scatter and clean-up-later attitude,

then We are separatists.

If to Whatever, We are assuredly conspiring cohorts.

Do You claim to provide what We've needed all along,

but have simply been too short-sighted to know We've needed?

Or do You delineate? Do You define Us by unpacking Us,

thereby reconstructing Us into sections of a whole untarnished tool?

Machinery, if you will?

Take, for instance, television.

Do We need, or even want to watch?

Needlessly We need it. We want it for lack of choice,

or so We think. It is, simply, there.

Easily - and how easily We may never know - one may turn

to the body's offerings, or the plummets and peaks of the mind.

Sport, science, language, art, human, essential, vivid, now -

they are nearer than no one knows; practically graspable.

But Static, You move Us to wish.

You **** Us to think we must consummate Ourselves.

As We said, We are separatists.

Declare some vapid civil war.

Who, then, will provide your nothings?

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Written by
christopher-howard-gorrie
American
Published
Sep 10, 2012
Lines·Words
22·184
Permission

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