Poem: Stephen Spender, in remembrance
Let prayers and bells ring out loudly proclaiming grief for the vanished, vanished dreams of a vanished generation- of poets who embraced their vocation with virginal passion; They were never old; Great edifices fell in their times, enraptured in their song, encaptured in arcs of blood, shuffling their broken, dusty wings, to new flights, new things, poised like the vapourous ethers tremulously on the brink of transmutation; Young gods, who worked their magic within, blazing their words like galaxies across the threshold of time- words of water, falling like the rain rising with the mists, hovering like hawks, fierce-eyed and beautiful, beautiful immortal birds; They have all gone, now, This, the last hawk stooping like a stream to the hillock, erased by lightning, cleansed by thunder, silenced lyre delivering words to the wind, forever rattling the windowpanes of our being into new visions of hope; Somewhere, on a field of gold, this flut...