SAND CASTLES

Once more to agonize the first day in the school

To lose the duel with the long words spelling
When fear of numbers tortured the nibbled pencil.
 In the dungeon of the first form
Letters are an enemy in disguise,
And when we, the children, overmaster the alphabet,
 Still not aware of dactyls, chalk maudlin runes
 Smuggled to girl-poets who with more pathos
Are composing better lyric sonnets,
 Yet we still build sandcastles;
When erection of the palaces by the river banks
Becomes a struggle instead of ecstasy,
It is the midnight hour
 To write poems, to trust the teachers,
 And to wreck our sand fortification;
 In the duplictious territory of the world
 Poesy is bedridden suffering from dehydration,
 And abandoned to die die it will,
 For doctors who could save it
 Elect to perish by ignorance
 Rather then live by knowledge,
 For is not such demise without art
An article of an involuntary suicide ?
 The same anarchic time that nullified the octavos
 Displaced the teachers and procreated professors
 Who unlike the doctors did not kill themselves,
 But their intellectual arsenic killed
Those poets who eluded the posse of the doctors In their sand garrisons
 Or were resurrected by their elegies.
 The third time the chronograph beat,
 It was for the funeral parade
And Requiem for the architects of the castles
 To whose citadels the new generation of erectors
 Laid siege, tore their white flag and exulted
 Among the ruins of the stronghold.
 Now all, the poets and poems,
Creators and creations, Teachers and professors
- Who, what or where they may be now,
What ,why, and where they write, construct or teach?
 If there is not antiphon to our agnosticism,
It is too late to consider Snow White,
 And if the childhood midnight
Is not born in the same time like that of an adult
Then the midnight of the dead
Cannot exist in the same time either.
 Like the midnight of the living.
Nevertheless the children are alive
Or want to be.
Then what is late for Goldilocks is never for children
 Unknown to the storyteller.
On the part of the educators It was precarious to let the pupils
Build the forts before the midnight's advance
 And bypass the grammar
While hoping that if expedient
 The future can bribe the time. Infancy does not know how to be young
 It is the directors of childhood
 Who counterfeit the epochs;
Embalm the fragments of purity.
 In the mind of a boy
Someone manipulates his toy soldiers
 Against cordial enemy monarchs
While in the adult mind something
 Manoeuvres our weapons
 To the indefensible lecture amphitheaters

 To mummify the dogmas.