Who have been educated out of naive responses, <br />The hoodoo of love, the cinderella of class <br />Knowing that everywhere man has the same clock face, <br />the same moody defences <br /> <br />Against age and the loss of love in the hope of millennimums <br />Who think too much perhaps of elegance <br />Or the form of wisdom, having outgrown dreams <br />Like baby clothes a long while since; <br /> <br />Wiseacres playing with terrible dolls in the twilight <br />holding our sides, thinking of mad Loyola <br />Or that bald maker of roads, the much stabbed Caesar <br />Till the stars are bright; <br /> <br />Who cannot live in the Very Lights of the headlines <br />Or forget the unrehearsed summer of the shires <br />Because Europe is frightened, quakes like a woman, <br />Looks wildly behind? <br /> <br />How shall we live except as plants or fays <br />Who cannot take ten deep breaths in any crowd? <br />Neither the whimsical mob, nor those whose better times <br />Are only a pierrots disguise <br /> <br />For the disastrous pathos of their present? <br />What shall we do who cannot place a candle <br />Before the ikon of the future, nor yet acquiesce <br />Unconsciously in habit? <br /> <br />For whom the actor's gesture, the preacher's word <br />Are not enough being at all times too conscious <br />Of the shortcomings of motive, who refuse drugs <br />And the tailspin of madness? <br /> <br />What shall we do with our hardened arteries <br />Under the zeppelin shade of catastrophe <br />but emulate the gloss and selfishness of china <br />Till the clocks fly away?<br /><br />Kenneth Allott<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/aunt-sally-speaks/
