Eliot: Foreigner Policy

February 09, 2017


I used to fry up, thunder forth, hot turmoils in my brain

Sat sedentary galloping, hell-bent on sharing pain

Unheedful that a comity might help me to obtain

A better company

Unheedful too of a mainline destination:

Where terminates express thoughts and begins dear consolation

A holy Bosphorus

As Darius did cross

A bell, an angelus;

A Great Conductor ringing quietens us

I grieved too much at variance against late-arising slow

Indecent slithers arse-wise-over on conceptual snow

A circus clown-like slip-up being just part of the show

Performed egregiously

Too little undespairing was I, not sparing that rod

That beats but beats itself up only leaves the culprits good

An an agonised and miserable behoof to Robin Hood:

Light comedy

Until along a famous day, came as of long pursuit,

A figuring out astonishingly of what might constitute

A being at ready to custard-pie the over-indulgent fruit

Of Adam’s apple

Lands’ foreign policies comiserate at Eden’s Garden gate

Evacuees are we there - the outcast couple of late

By high decree does consciousness make all of us that thief

Who arrayed beside our Lord

Traced out inevitable declension in a Fall

That apple bite a lowest common denominator,

A last exigency, doctrinal to defend:

That apple in the tub which turns the barrel rotten

Neglected shall forever comprehend

Our gorgeous schemes for armouries and arsenals

As hedgefunds of great height, stonewalls of surety,

In event a feral turned iniquity,

Contaminant contaminates withal

That evil ways take opportune advantage;

A serpent in the barrel slakes with single taste

His thirst and so enjoys the vintage all to waste;

Bids constantly

And haunts, and hunts, dissevers kind communion

Breaks brother off from brother, kin from kin;

A weevil in the brain our fears discover

Alive ever and amain

Along the reaches of our being humankind

All working malign magic in the mazy mind

By its discretions we resign within defeated

And are defined

Until one Man restore us from that fatal tree

Eradicate its emminence over you and me

That One of whom no prophet comes from Galilee

Was spoke mistakenly

An incidental error sowed of Satan’s seed;

Met in a wilderness, defeated there, and bound

Strong man’s possessions pillaged, and his province strook;

This Enemy

No foreigners; then thus no foreign policy;

A Victor hanging from a common tree

A passion that might every one regenerate,

Embrace at door the halt and lame as family.

You can also find this poem at steemit.