Lawrence Ferlinghetti is the last of the great beat writers. Jack Kerouac is gone, Allen Ginsberg is gone, and William S. Burroughs is gone. But Ferlinghetti is still here and his voice is clearer than ever. Here's one of his best poems, the first one in his Coney Island of the Mind.
In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See ...
In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
‘suffering humanity’
They writhe upon the page
in a veritable rage
of adversity
Heaped up
groaning with babies and bayonets
under cement skies
in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
bent statues bats wings and beaks
slippery gibbets
cadavers and carnivorous cocks
and all the final hollering monsters
of the
‘imagination of disaster’
they are so bloody real
it is as if they really still existed
And they do
Only the landscape is changed
They still are ranged along the roads
plagued by legionnaires
false windmills and demented roosters
They are the same people
only further from home
on freeways fifty lanes wide
on a concrete continent
spaced with bland billboards
illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness
The scene shows fewer tumbrils
but more strung-out citizens
in painted cars
and they have strange license plates
and engines
that devour America
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To read more about Ferlinghetti and visit some of his poems, check out his page at the Poetry Foundation.
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