There's a New Age Coming!

when serpents bargain for the right to squirm
and the sun strikes to gain a living wage-
when thorns regard their roses with alarm
and rainbows are insured against old age

when every thrush may sing no new moon in
if all screech-owls have not okayed his voice
-and any wave signs on the dotted line
or else an ocean is compelled to close

when the oak begs permission of the birch
to make an acorn-valleys accuse their
mountains of having altitude-and march denounces april as a saboteur


then we'll believe in that incredible
unanimal mankind(and not until)

e e cummings

Well, mr cummings had an idea when he wrote this one, didn't he? In three quatrains and a couplet, he describes a world we don't know - a world in which nature starts acting nutty - the way people do!


I got to thinking about this one earlier today. Last Friday, I stopped at Barnes & Noble and bought the new Enya CD for Peggy. She reported this morning, with no small amount of exasperation, that her car’s CD player spit the CD out every time she tried to insert it.


Heh heh - he said “insert.“


Now, in the interest of honesty, I must point out that Enya’s is not the sort of music I care for. In fact, I bought the CD with a certain trepidation - not that I didn’t want Peggy to have this CD that she so wanted, but because of my fear that I might be truckjacked on my way home, and then in tomorrow morning’s Baltimore SUN there would be an entry in the Police Blotter that said, in part: “…the police reported that the victim was robbed at gunpoint of his Toyota pick-up-truck, red in color but in need of a good waxing, his lunch bag, his work bag, and an Enya CD.”



Heh heh - he said "Enya."


How does one explain that? I’d as soon not be a victim of crime, if that’s how this works.


But what if cummings was on to something? You know how they always claim - “they” - that nature has bred a breed of super rats who are impervious to all of our poisons, who scoff at our traps, whose only known weakness is watching all those CSI shows?


What if we are developing a type of CD player that refuses, on purely aesthetic grounds, to play New Age music?


How about a toaster oven that refuses to brown any Thomas Corn Toast-R-Cakes, since they taste like a mouthful of sugar with a kernel of corn?


A TV that won’t show Fox News?


A glass that won’t hold Dr Pepper?


Musk cologne for men that won’t come out of the bottle, thereby sparing hundreds an olfactory assault?


I’m assured by operatives over at Best Buy that we now have a setting on DVD players that will eject, with maximum prejudice, any disc containing “acting” by Jim Belushi.



Thanks for the idea, e e !