The Past's Great Power Overpowers Every Hour
Delmore Schwartz
                                    Dear Citizens,
We live upon the past and day by day
The past destroys us. Who can look back?
And who can see the back of his head?
And who can see the depths of his mind?
Who can turn so his head upon his neck
That as he runs he holds the past in view?
For who can look both north and south at once?

Come, let us play cache-cache or blind-man's bluff,
And pin the tail on the abundant goat
                                    for all our guilt,
As if we did not know in blind-man's bluff
And all the arts and all the games each one
But seeks himself? As if you never knew at all
That everywhere you tour, you take yourself.

                                    When, Citizens,
I placed a seashell to my ear, I heard
My heart roar PANDEMONIUM,
                                    which was to say
Every devil from hell yells in your heart,
Or shuffles coarsely as coal rides down a chute.

For is it not, in truth, an obscene play,
The past which senselessly recites in us,
Obsessive as the whippoorwill,
Like starlight on the pane, irrational,
—Inspired by what? inspired by the blaze
of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Awake, my dears, and be deceived no more:
What is our hope, except to tell the truth?
from the book THE COLLECTED POEMS OF DELMORE SCHWARTZ / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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