Quotes from benet stephen vincent ii

These I see, Blazing through all eternity, A fire-winged sign, a glorious tree!

Grant us victory over the tyrants who would enslave all free men and nations. Grant us faith and understanding to cherish all those who fight for freedom as if they were our brothers. Grant us brotherhood in hope and union, not only for the space of this bitter war, but for the days to come which shall and must unite all the children of earth.

He was telling the story and the failures and the endless journey of mankind. They got tricked and trapped and bamboozled, but it was a great journey. And no demon that was ever foaled could know the inwardness of it -- it took a man to do that.

Americans are always moving on. It's an old Spanish custom gone astray, A sort of English fever, I believe, Or just a mere desire to take French leave, I couldn't say. I couldn't really say. But, when the whistle blows, they go away. Sometimes there never was a whistle blown, But they don't care, for they can blow their own Whistles of willow-stick and rabbit-bone, Quail-calling through the rain A dozen tunes but only one refrain, "We don't know where we're going, but we're on our way!"

The girls Have the brief-blooming, rhododendron-youth Of pioneer women, and the black-toothed age. And if you yearn to meet your pioneers, You'll find them there, the same men, inbred sons Of inbred sires perhaps, but still the same; A pioneer-island in a world that has No use for pioneers--the unsplit rock Of Fundamentalism, calomel, Clan-virtues, clannish vices, fiddle-tunes And a harsh God.

For the women who mourn their dead in the secret night, For the children taught to keep quiet, the old children, The children spat-on at school. For the wrecked laboratory, The gutted house, the dunged picture, the pissed-in well The naked corpse of Knowledge flung in the square And no man lifting a hand and no man speaking.

She is all peace, all quiet, All passionate desires, the eloquent thunder Of new, glad suns, shouting aloud for joy

A moment's glance of fire, of fire, Spiring, leaping, flaming higher, Into the intense, the cloudless blue, Until two souls were one, and flame, And very flesh, and yet the same!

Like a clear brook most full of light, Or olives swaying on a height, So silver they have wings, almost; Like a great word once known and lost And meaning all things.

Of all the Christbitten places in the two hemispheres, [Los Angeles] is the last curly kink in the pig's tail.

God pity us indeed, for we are human, And do not always see The vision when it comes, the shining change, Or, if we see it, do not follow it, Because it is too hard, too strange, too new, Too unbelievable, too difficult, Warring too much with common, easy ways.

Something begins, begins; Starlit and sunlit, something walks abroad In flesh and spirit and fire. Something is loosed to change the shaken world.

Ah, God, I trod them down where I have trod, And they remain, and they remain, Etched in unutterable pain, Loved lips and faces now apart, That once were closer than my heart-- In agony, in agony, And horribly a part of me....

Floating downward, very clear, still the echoes reach the ear Of a little tune he whistles and a little song he sings, Mounting, mounting still, triumphant, on his torn and broken wings!

No--no other man is cursed With such doubleness of eye, They can hunger, they can thirst, But they know for what and why.

If the hunters think we do all things by chants and spells, they may believe so -- it does not hurt them.

We had a rock to defend, and we defended it. And the name of that rock is Liberty, and in that name I speak.