A poem from RAW

Photo by UX Gun on Unsplash

Man Becomes What He Hates

It seems now Goya foresaw it

when he painted the wolf instructing the monks,

"Misera humaninad, la culpa es tuya."

And we, shivering in the sudden cold

of revelation, look on the work

of our hands. Hiroshima,

"a city," my old almanac says

"of 340,000." We sent the plane,

You and me and our President. We

did it because we were Liberals and

Anti-fascists; we did it

to make Peace and preserve Democracy.

Bitter, now, to note

now in conversations about our time

the name of that city always seems

to fall snugly into place alongside

the names of Buchenwald and Belsen.

-- Robert E. Wilson

(From the Realist, Issue 6, February 1959. The source is Martin Wagner. Note that "Robert Edward Wilson" was RAW's birth name; he adopted the "Robert Anton Wilson" byline early in his writing career.)