I could not resist when I saw this post by Bad Kitties IAN diary from posting a "rewriting" of Marvell I did some 30 years ago. That was the decade of Reagan's great pursuit of nukes and space wars.
Like Bad Kitties, that poem is also one of my favorites. I wrote a different version to be, or so I thought, more appropriate to the human situation in this our world.
So, below the golden infinity symbol...
To Our Coy Leaders
Variations on the great poem of Andrew Marvell
If we had world enough and time.
Disdain and ploying were not crime.
We would sit down and talk vast years,
Debate and bait each other's fears.
You by the river Volga's side
Could'st evil find. We by the tide
Of the Potomac would beguile. We would desire
Ten thousand years before the fire,
And we could, if we chose, deploy
Till the Conversion of the last cowboy.
Our vegetable talks could slowly evolve
From grasping for empire to sharing resolve.
A hundred years would go to just decide
How many mirved warheads could dance on each side.
A billion dollars for every weapon's test,
And many trillions for the rest.
A kalpa to argue each warhead's parts
Till the last age would reveal our hearts.
For, humanity, we deserve this state!
But should we not grow at a faster rate?
For at my back I always hear
Nuclear weapons of paranoid fear.
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of radioactivity.
Our beauty shall no more be found
Nor in the nuclear dust shall sound
The living voice of a single soul,
Not nightingale nor owl nor crow,
Then our quaint valor will be naught but dust
And turned to ashes our greedy lust.
The final judgement on our erring mind
Will be nuclear winter, the end of mankind.
So now, while the missiles lie still entombed
In gloomy silos, prefiguring doom,
Now while leaders continue to conspire
To seize the advantage and instantly fire,
Now, let us learn to trust. Today!
Dismantle these grievous birds of prey.
Rather at once our greed devour,
Than kill one another with misguided power.
Let us roll all people, and all
Nations up into a ball:
Deliver the child of life's rebirth
On this green and gibbous holy earth.
Thus together we can evolve
The great commandment to love.
by: Sydney Vilen, aka dharmasyd
~thank you for thinking~