Seeming to live <br />and always taking leave and re-attaching, <br />re-inventing love and hate and obligation <br />we are shadow-beings, abusing reason, <br />talking of 'soul' and always beyond all consolation. <br /> <br />We talk of beauty, but what we mean <br />is sad adornment of the squalor that we make. <br />We talk of 'progress': our progressive <br />enslavement to comfort - no give, all take <br /> <br />from whom and what we crush for comfort's sake; <br />progressive dependency on rapine <br />and diminishment of the whole world - <br />we demi-beings of too much light <br />and chatter, infantile, unillumined, arrogant and fake.<br /><br />Anthony Weir<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sonnet-inspired-by-the-last-words-of-rilke-s-8th-elegy/
