What

March 16, 2021 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | PETER'S WRITING, POLITICS, Ulalume | 0 Comments | 0

(with apologies to Rudyard Kipling)

What can you keep when everyone around you

Is hysterical and blaming all on you,

“What the dickens,” is the way they sound you

Out, and stipulate the new taboo;

What the devil is the endless queuing,

The waiting by the door we see, surprised,

What went down when everyone was booing,

When emerged one, no longer disguised:

—

What you dream you are is often vaster;

Than the actual world and all that’s real;

What you wish against is the disaster

Of your thinking overbearing how you feel;

What you bear to hear your truth be spoken

Is for the formulation of new rules,

What you want is not to be a token,

Or on the margin once the passion cools:

—

What was a mighty heap of all your sinnings

And parts of you that needed to be lost,

What extraneous labels led back to beginnings

In the cleansing furnace where Rosebud was tossed;

If you can force your brain and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And identify when there is nothing in you

Except the will which says to them: ‘Dream on!’

—

What can you say to people, absent virtue,

When they cannot bear to look or touch,

What sacred facts perennially hurt you,

If opinions fly beyond your desperate clutch;

What price now the unforgiving minute

With everyone prepared to read you wrong,

Have the earth and everything that’s in it,

But you’ll never ‘scape the judgment of the throng!