Friday, April 12, 2019

Upsoaring wings: Breath is money


Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the grand old man of the Beat generation—poet, artist, bookseller and publisher—celebrated his 100th birthday last month by publishing an autobiographical novel. He doesn’t consider himself a Beat poet, but he certainly captured those times.

As owner of City Lights Bookstore and Publishing, he published many of the Beats; he was arrested on obscenity charges for publishing Allan Ginsburg’s Howl. The subsequent trial was a landmark First Amendment case, which Ferlinghetti won when the judge ruled the poem had redeeming social value.

Seems odd that this happened in San Francisco, but it was the 50s.

Ferlinghetti identifies as a philosophical anarchist, and he has opposed totalitarianism all his life. In 2006, in the midst of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of the Tea Party and other bad juju, Ferlinghetti wrote a poem echoing Khalil Gibran’s “Pity the Nation”. It’s appalling that the update was needed 73 years after Gibran, and that it’s even more needed 13 years on.

“Pity the Nation”
(After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerers
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to  erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
 My country, tears of thee
 Sweet land of liberty!



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