As Auden Said
Egon Knowles | A poem
“Stop all clocks, cut off the telephone”
Lock your kids in and hide the women
Silence the cries of accusations and regrets
Step into the shadows and into the darkness
Let the terror reign
And the power hungry delve
In their joyous celebration
The righteous surely won’t
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As they feast with their brethren
What remains is a hollow nest
Of infectious greed
Of treachery and disease
As Auden said
“For nothing now can ever come to any good.”
And the chorus sang
One last hymn
Before we put away the sun
Mothball the earth
Before we all swept away
One last hymn
November 2024
Author’s Note: This poem channels W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” to express profound political despair, taking his famous lines about personal grief and repurposing them for collective mourning. Where Auden lamented a lover’s death, the poem treats a political outcome as a kind of death — of hope, of decency, of a certain vision of the future. The apocalyptic imagery escalates from locking away the vulnerable to ‘mothballing the earth’ itself. Beneath the despair runs a current of anger: words like ‘power hungry,’ ‘infectious greed,’ and ‘treachery’ aren’t just sad but accusatory and bitter. There’s a sharp moral division between those who ‘feast with their brethren’ and everything else that becomes hollow. Written from a place of raw feeling rather than measured reflection, it captures a particular moment of political grief and rage — a warning that, one year later, feels cautiously prophetic.
