Ancestral Gates

Open the Gates

Within the city of the burning cloud,

Dragging my life behind me in a sack,

Naked I prowl, scourged by the black

Temptation of the blood grown proud.

Here at the monumental door,

Carved with the curious legend of my youth,

I brandish the great bone of my death,

Beat once therewith and beat no more.

The hinges groan: a rush of forms

Shivers my name, wrenched out of me.

I stand on the terrible threshold, and I see

The end and the beginning in each other’s arms.

-Stanley Kunitz

from The Collected Poems
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Get serious. Get political. Orient yourself toward the masses. Extend yourself beyond the middle-classes. Establish bonds within the working-classes. Forget ambition as it's played out. Forget 'achievement' as it's been defined to you. Forget all perfections of the status quo. Forget about the 'inevitability of change'. Forget all these that remove you from the class struggle. "By hook or by crook." Forgetting. And Remembering.

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"Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to... Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?"  -George Orwell, 1984