Moral Man/Immoral Society
After Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man Immoral Society (1932)

In memoriam for the victims of terror in London last week. (Please note: The poem is not about how Londoners feel or how any victim of terror feels. I would not presume. My sympathy for the dead and harmed in London led me to the poem which explores the notion of moral man/immoral society as expressed in Niebuhr)

Moral Man/Immoral Society
By Sean Farragher

Most truth we know has an end and marks
thought to what resides in the human heart
minus the incontestable dream of life forever
without chemical rash or complicated skin;
all aches perish with survival on last
ocean wave –-every undulated crest
twisted. Truncated stem wraps right
to incorrect -- and worse harmony
deciphers wrong as zero, light as dark, --
while one is naught as confused map
and foil for the uncounted numbers
of terror's unpredictable deaths.


2.

There is no happiness
alive in stardom or infamy
just the bored storm
and the oft repeated scam
that man the optimist has proven
stronger than truth, whatever
the logic of the ruse that lie
runs between the schemes of oath
and saccharine promise to reveal
the edge of paradise to common eye
and drive all of Hades to shady spite
where the hoard of vermin congeal
in puddles of engineered slime
called by master for servant
to their less significant deaths.

3

Love rides away.
She keeps her steps
and laughs as I hold
her eyes to heaven
where steamed horizon
is now dark infernal
tributary of Tigris Hudson
Thames -- It lives
red inside yellow flower
crisp and black top gray cliff
while every ochre/brown branch
rides fingers inside
the contour of sex
while joy/bliss on horizon/
palisades still, quiet --
brave oaths released in air
above where genesis
renews its teeth shrouded mouth
to swallow him and her –
brave children born
our day rows simple canoe
by tender hand between
left and right,
storm and calm,
age and youth,
for inside praise
holy sacrament dwells
while love’s candor
writhes without excuse.

If most of this were true,
then terror heard would be
stricken from vocabulary
and new words would be soft rain
drawn down upon eyes so every
lid was open to moral rage
and pathetic rant. Is it not?

There's no place to hide.
Crafted music drives
the furies to the hills
and keeps the beaches
soft with salt and sand.
Every dune will change
tomorrow and today.

Perhaps, nothing exists,
but NOW -- that far away
grace of frail alluvium --
There, under foot, crushed
residue and shell commits
time to its lead pocket.




XXX