{"id":121278,"date":"2018-11-12T12:00:02","date_gmt":"2018-11-12T12:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=121278"},"modified":"2018-10-30T14:37:48","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T14:37:48","slug":"for-eli-jacobson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/11\/for-eli-jacobson\/","title":{"rendered":"For Eli Jacobson"},"content":{"rendered":"

December 1952<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are few of us now, soon
\nThere will be none. We were comrades
\nTogether, we believed we
\nWould see with our own eyes the new
\nWorld where man was no longer
\nWolf to man, but men and women
\nWere all brothers and lovers
\nTogether. We will not see it.
\nWe will not see it, none of us.
\nIt is farther off than we thought.
\nIn our young days we believed
\nThat as we grew old and fell
\nOut of rank, new recruits, young
\nAnd with the wisdom of youth,
\nWould take our places and they
\nSurely would grow old in the
\nGolden Age. They have not come.
\nThey will not come. There are not
\nMany of us left. Once we
\nMarched in closed ranks, today each
\nOf us fights off the enemy,
\nA lonely isolated guerrilla.
\nAll this has happened before,
\nMany times. It does not matter.
\nWe were comrades together.
\nLife was good for us. It is
\nGood to be brave \u2014 nothing is
\nBetter. Food tastes better. Wine
\nIs more brilliant. Girls are more
\nBeautiful. The sky is bluer
\nFor the brave \u2014 for the brave and
\nHappy comrades and for the
\nLonely brave retreating warriors.
\nYou had a good life. Even all
\nIts sorrows and defeats and
\nDisillusionments were good,
\nMet with courage and a gay heart.
\nYou are gone and we are that
\nMuch more alone. We are one fewer,
\nSoon we shall be none. We know now
\nWe have failed for a long time.
\nAnd we do not care. We few will
\nRemember as long as we can,
\nOur children may remember,
\nSome day the world will remember.
\nThen they will say, \u201cThey lived in
\nThe days of the good comrades.
\nIt must have been wonderful
\nTo have been alive then, though it
\nIs very beautiful now.\u201d
\nWe will be remembered, all
\nOf us, always, by all men,
\nIn the good days now so far away.
\nIf the good days never come,
\nWe will not know. We will not care.
\nOur lives were the best. We were the
\nHappiest men alive in our day.
\n____________________________________________<\/p>\n

[ERRATA:<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>“brother and lovers<\/em>” should be “brothers and sisters and lovers<\/em>.<\/em>”\u00a0“They will not come” isn’t true. They’re coming. They’re here. “We were the happiest men alive in our day<\/em>” should be “We were the happiest men and women alive in our day<\/em>.” –\u00a0EH]<\/p>\n

From <\/em>The Collected Shorter Poems, Copyright <\/em>\u00a9 1956 by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kenneth Rexroth<\/em> was a California-based poet who received awards from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Academy of American Poets. He died in 1982.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thesunmagazine.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

December 1952<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":115817,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-format"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}