Radical by Marianne Moore

Radical

by Marianne Moore 1887 – 1972

Tapering
to a point, conserving everything,
this carrot is predestined to be thick.
The world is
but a circumstance, a mis-
erable corn-patch for its feet. With ambition,
imagination, outgrowth,

nutriment,
with everything crammed belligerent-
ly inside itself, its fibres breed mon-
opoly —
a tail-like, wedge-shaped engine with the
secret of expansion, fused with intensive heat
to the color of the set-

ting sun and
stiff. For the man in the straw hat, stand-
ing still and turning to look back at it —
as much as
to say my happiest moment has
been funereal in comparison with this, the con-
ditions of life pre-

determined
slavery to be easy and freedom hard. For
it? Dismiss
agrarian lore; it tells him this:
that which it is impossible to force, it is
impossible to hinder.

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Let’s make space for the one this Fall on One Poem Only.

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