Your friends come fondly to your living room
believing, my dear, that the occasion’s mild.
Who still feels forty as a moral crise
in this, the Century of the Common Child?
Uncommon gifts, brought to mid-life in pain,
are not a prize. The age demands a cure
for tragedy and gives us brand-new charts
for taking down our psychic temperature.
Othello, of course, regrets having been aggressive,
Hamlet feels pretty silly to think he trusted
terms such as “art” and “honor” instead of “projection,”
and out on the moor King Lear feels maladjusted.
An arrogant richness of the human stuff
is not a value. Nobody wants to be
left holding the bag of himself when all the others
are a democratic homogeneity.
Prospero strips down to his underpants
to teach Miranda that fathers can be informal,
while Cleopatra, Juliet, Rosalind, Kate
fight for the golden apple labelled NORMAL.
In such a state, what laurels can poems bring,
what consolation, what wishes, what advice?
May your conflicts thin out with your hair? BE HAPPY?
We hope you’re feeling well? We think you’re nice?
Till Burnam Wood shall come to Dunsinane,
till time shall tell us what we really are,
till Responsibility, not Health, defines
the terms of living on this serious star,
to receive the trauma of birth and pass it on
is all we’re here for. Yet we hope you realize
we’re glad that forty years ago you came
to join us in this neurotic enterprise.
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