Hon. Arthur Davison Ficke
7 East 9th St.

N.Y.C.

STATION 2 CENTS

STA

63

THE TRACTOR

From first life on to worms, to life in shells,
Great reptiles, water monsters, giant wings,
Then birds with songs, and breasts of milk, on up
Through mud and rocks, leaving huge skeletons
To show what was, and why it was, if man
can ever unriddle that. Coal can be used
For factories, and gasoline for wheels,
That being so some think the tropic growths,
Club mosses, horse tails, and the pollarded tops
Of giant trees, the insects, pollen drifts,
And bodies of the jointed-footed things
That took the earth, that spiders, centipedes,
And scorpions were spawned and layered down
For man's good for these tractors, bombing planes.
If so it comes to using once again
A spider venom, but with a venemous mind,
Seeing that man has spider mandibles,
And cunning, hunger, engineered by mind.

So land snails made themselves a sacrifice
For concrete roads--man shall be sacrificed
For what? Who knows? What is the next advance?
Is it roads to heaven? For many million years
Debris and spores, which gathered from the sun
Great stores of energy drifted and lay still,
While rocks submerged them, where the dinosaur
Lay down to sleep, and never woke again,
Worn out or stung to death, or starved, while still
The giant spider sunned its deadly eggs
To hatch the brood to stalk forth, kill and eat,
Prefiguring the spider days of men;
And wings long-fingered, like a parachute,
Flopped through the limbs of spiring palm-like growths,
Barked like the crocodile, destined to be
Coal with a thousand merchant chemistries,
Or gas, which is akin to mind--for what?
Why trees laid down for coal and gas? Why mind?

Was the pterodactyl just the prophecy
Of the bombing plane, and formed to model one?
And was tyrranosaurus of twenty tons,
Trampling the jungle, and breaking down huge trees,
A living tank, by which to pattern iron
That crushed the tenant's house, and takes his land
For larger fields, and greater crops for banks,
While he is driven to the tent of doles,
As even tyrranosaurus siezed the swamp?
What matter about a destiny, end in view,
If now the bombing plane is just those wings,
And the tractor that giant reptile? Ena or no
This is the genesis, the mad result,
The reptile mind goes on despite the fact
That dinosaurs died off, as man may die,
Do fighting on the level of devil gears,
Wheels and machines, If tractors eat the fields

77

THE TRIUMPH OF EARTH

Letdown, as by a rope, into this cistern of twilight,
This cistern of darkness, the flesh feels centipedes and spiders
About feet slipping in slime, while the eyes look up
Through the door of the cistern into a sky of blue,
And white clouds, and by night at stars and planets,
And the miraculous moon. The ears hear music in the heavens,
Which the shriek of rats and the slithering of serpents
Fitfully annul, until at times, it seems
There is no music, nothing but the sound of crawling life.

Here if the soul had a mate darkness and doubt
Might be better endured. But men and women are not made
To harmonize, their physical beings give them hostile minds.
As for our fellows, we are told out of a Book of Heaven
To love one another, but our natures make that impossible,
We are made of flash and spirit incapable of loving one another;
We are made parasites, and endowed with savage hunger,
And live in the cistern only by the way of the cannibal.
Even man's imagination gifted with vision to heal,
To lift, has an equal capacity to wound, to destroy,
And by its subtlety divination knows the sensitive spots for stings.
Forgive your enemis, but also in the words of the prophet
Curse into hell all who resist your doctrine,
Put them with the misguided Judas, who was never forgiven,
Not even by him who counseled forgiveness seventy times seven.
For there is only one path, even though human eyes are lenses
Of different strength and adjustment, so that the wise,
So that the just, the philosopher see one thing,
And the foolish, the bigoted, the tyrant and the devourer

See another thing; so that the daily record of events
Sees one thing, an history, the ample perpective,
Sees another thing, an man at his peril sees it aright, if possible.
Nothing in the world is gauged ideally to man,
While man's spirit is a part of life's restless froth and whirl,
Man's spirit is a spiritual spermatozoon,
Seeking some ovum, it knows not what, mad for merging and mitosis,
Longing for God, yet not knowing whether God

Is the creation of the mind's desire, or is it a divined reality;
Not knowing whether it be better to doubt everything,
Or to believe in something passionately, though deceived at last,
In a world not enough for the human spirit, yet too much,
While the heart aches for something more,
And aches because earth defrauds and deceives,
And aches because the will to life must be ever asserted,
Day by day, either asserted or surrendered.

This leaves the soul bewteen a kind of immortality,
And death, approached by hourly dying.

Our love is like the angel's, our strength as sparrows,
Our life is lived in an earth better than man,
Yet falling short of the soul's vision and desire.

Our life is lived in an earth where the proofs of God
Are exactly balanced by disproofs, paralell columns
That say yes and no, item by item. You must make your choice,
You must form belief according to your hope, your fear,
Or according to your resentment and courage--
But resentment and courage are not proof.

The Word was too much for the flesh, and when
The Word entered the flesh tragedy and strife had fresh fuel.

3

97

The Earth's idiocy flourished like thistles
Blown everywhere by Satanic winds,
Seeking to make man's predicament harder.

The doctrine looked like love, but closer examined
It was seen that God would avenge his elect,
That God would repay by being ashamed of those
Who were ashamed of him, that whoever denies God
God will deny him--an eye for an eye, atooth for a tooth
Even as of old, the uttermost farthing exacted as of old.

The Prince of Peace carried a sword, and his followers
Were sent forth with scrip and purse and guns.

Nothing was changed from the most ancient days,
Nothing but a deceiving veneer. His yoke was heralded as light,
Yet everyone had to bear his own cross, and there was no rest.
Seed scattered in stony ground did not sprout, and a good tree
Borought forth good fruit, but who made and planted the tree?
And above this father was divided from son, and the mother
Was turned against the daughter, and hate arose
Because Aust was shaken from feet by the gates
Of rejecting cities. Lies multiplied in the earth,
The eggs of maggots were laid in the flesh of men,
And hatched into worms that devoured, they were lies,
They were illusions, they were the old contradictions
Of opposed truth and falsehood, fructified,
Bringing poison into every hour, and insanity,
Until only the great could be calm and sane
Amid the stinging antitheses. To say Peace, but to disembowel
With the sword perplexed earth facing the idiot ages.

The carpenter's son was worse off than foxes--

97

He had no hole, no place to lay his head.
The fisherman was a beggar, and created a cult
Of mendicants, fanatics, and a vast mythology arose.
But the Pope, the vicegerent of the carpenter's son,
The successor of the fisherman, carrying the keys of heaven,
Lives in a palace, and sleeps on down, and drinks good wine;
He lives like a king, and rules the enclave of a sovereignty,
Which in turn controls and taxes three hundred million
Of subjects. He lives in a palace guarded by soldiers,
And policemen, waited upon by ambassadors and servants,
And sending ambassadors to states and kingdoms over the earth.
He says his kingdom is not of this world, yet he makes
The whole world his kingdom, listening into the world's affairs
By the radio, and, taking his outing in a kingly automobile,
Clothed in fine linen embroidered in gold. He fights crude wars,
Like the Thirty Years War, which was waged for the Eucharist.
He helps to strangle the liberty of hungry and enslaved Spain,
At the same time he prays for peace. Give peace, O lord, he prays,
Give peace in these days, he pray. For there is none other
That fighteth for us, but only thou, O Lord--
God is love, but God is also a warrior, a skiller--
Let there be peace in thy strength, O Lord,
An, plenty in thy strong person, which being interpreted
Means there is peace when the battlefield is silent,
And, the vultures are gorged; which means there is plenty
When Peter's Pence and tribute swells the treasury of the Vatican.
Which means there is peace when the pirate Sir Francis Drake
Is kneeling at prayer; when France, the art dealer
Fondles his treasures offered for sale, and sends money to Rome;
When America, a business man trying to understand culture

5

Attends to business and forgets its faith, its dreams;
When Russia, a back hall that stinks, stinks again of monarchy;
When Germany, the metaphysician, forgets world commerce;
When Japan, the rat, having crawled the hawser ropes of pirate ships
Is breeding in granaries of China, and is gorged and drowsy;
When China is gutted, and forgets Confucius and Lao-tze,
And vermin breed amid the crumbled walls of T'ien T'an,
The great altar of heaven, and vultures coot on the roofs,
And in niches above the arches of Pailou. That is peace,
That is plenty, that is the good end of the war
Fought by the Lord, as only the Lord can fight.
That is the fruit of forgiveness, of turning the other cheek,
Of vengeance, of implacable hate, or carrying the sword,
Of the will of God alone in heaven as it is on earth.

O beautiful, most beautiful, most absurd earth!
O beloved earth, loved as a man loves the breasts of a harlot,
Loved as a woman who has lost her mind,
But whose laughter is still musical, whose eyes still mirror miracles,
Whose loins still give madness, but whose words tangle,
Whosechia is idiocy, and with whom continued union
Is a torture, a danger.

O blue heaven of white clouds,
And you the stars numberless in the measureless sky,
Seen from the darkness of the cistern through the door of the cistern,
It is you that divide our thought, and when lifemakes us say
Life is evil, to say also that life is as sweet as it is bitter.
From somewhere, and somehow there is faith in us
That earth cannot take away.

March 11 1940.