What are the ultimate springs of human action and compunction?
Life and breath of society were shows.¹
Society lives only in the cement of my person,
In the clay and lime it must grind and roast
For mixing with the sand and sea of my halcyon,
Expansive days. And the more I grossed,
The more I owe, the more life I can give
To society. Then what gives the docile and imitative
Swarm? Continuity and belonging to the rose! ²
The rose courts no roseate but a stripe-suited air-marshal
To shake her gold hands: so the hive needs true
Outgoing sympathy, proboscis-impartial
Towards blooms and buds of all hues. Virtue
Oft on the wings of pollinators has flown
To blooms not aggressing or ingratiating to be known,
Whose nectar is not sickly but a bee-welcome brew.
But greed is gilding a man-trap to estrange them
From the buzz of humanizing encounters, their womb.³
Like mooning wolf-children, the feral will derange them,
Having torn their humanity from the threaded loom.
That tragic non-person, Hauser, did not thrive:
He cherished inanimate objects as if live,
Thought like the babes that Avarice will groom.
¹Communist societies
crushed individuality.
²The metaphor for society in this poem is the soil, adding educational fertiliser to happy childhood memories (sand and sea). As plants need pollination, the hive (the workplace) is also necessary for developing social skills and awareness...
³Social encounters are like bees to the rose: they fertilise and regenerate us if they are non-judgmental and we welcome otherness. Capitalism thrives on treating people as means to making profits, embedding us in economic, rather than in the social relationships which help us to become well-rounded people.