 My grandmother who lived the longest I knew for the shortest span of time. Ninety-six when you left this life, Only thirty or so of your latter years Did we have to spend together After you appeared suddenly In my family’s life, like a flash in the sky, As the mysteries of Momma’s birth And adoption were resolved, And we met you at the Davis Brothers roadside Restaurant there in Georgia’s Appalachian foothills On a late spring Southern evening. Overflowing with kindness and encouragement In this life, patiently bearing your final trials, Now you are receiving the rewards Of your faith in Christ in Paradise, Where saints and angels and all Christian folk Rejoice in the Presence of the Trinity And enjoy the foretaste of blessings to come After the Lord’s return and the renewal of all things. Here in your absence, life goes on, A continual Goodbye to everyone we know, Memory mingled with pain For our inability to keep them close by: Photographs, videos, voices, each a stab Of nostalgia as they glide before eyes and ears Or arise in the eyes of the mind. ‘Wish I could see you’ – Some of your last words spoken to me, Traversing the many miles between us Over the telephone line. Now, your soul separated From your body for a time, I believe you can, should the Lord allow it. And through prayers to God for you, A small reunion takes place here today In anticipation of the greater one After death and time are abolished And the mystical Kingdom of God Fills the cosmos to the uttermost.
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 In the world today, there are well-known singing competitions on major television stations that help launch singers to national and international fame. For the Southern gal Emy-Lou Biendenharn, born in 1902 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, those were not options. She had a more difficult path to travel. Yet walk it she did, and with the typical strength and grace of a lady of Dixieland. AncestryEmy-Lou’s family was no stranger to hardship. Her grandfather Herman Henry Biedenharn emigrated alone from Germany to New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1852, and in order to have some cash on-hand, he sold some of his clothes during his journey upon the sea for $2.50. His grandmother, Louisa Lundberg, left Denmark in 1854 with her family for the United States. Their ship sank on the way over, and only she and her father survived the ordeal, losing her mother and four siblings shortly after their arrival in New York due to the effects of exposure to the elements (and all their property to the depths of the ocean). Herman and Louisa by God’s Providence would meet in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1862 and get married that same year. Though they were recent arrivals to the South, they quickly formed a deep and lasting bond with her. Herman voluntarily joined the Confederate Army in the latter part of 1862 and served in Vicksburg until its fall. He would remain in Vicksburg after the War, opening two businesses, a shoe shop and confectionary store. Their first son, Joseph Biedenharn, being an enterprising fellow like his father, quit school when he was 14 to work in the family’s confectionary store. This fascination with sugary things would lead to a remarkable event later in his life: He became the first person to bottle Coca-Cola in 1894. Emy-Lou: BeginningsOl’ Joe would marry Annie Schlottman and together they would have four children: three boys and one girl, Emma Louise (later shortened to Emy-Lou). As part of her education, Emy-Lou’s mother made her learn to play the piano, which she hated. ‘There were tears, but there was music,’ she would write of her childhood lessons. This is rocky soil for the seeds of a musical career. Nevertheless, Emy-Lou would later go on to develop a love of singing, attending prestigious schools in Cincinnati, Indiana, and Boston from 1921-5. Later would come lessons in Kansas City, Missouri, and London, England. DebutAfter years of intensive training in the aforesaid places together with successful public performances, Emy-Lou’s first international performance of note came in London in 1931 at Wigmore Hall. Performing a mix of classical and contemporary songs, from Schubert to John Alden Carpenter, she received high praise from the music critics in England: ‘The June 26, 1931 Daily Telegraph stated, “There can be no question that Mme. Biedenharn is an artist of high distinction” while the Juen 27 The Times declared Emy-Lou “possessed a contralto voice of unusual richness and beauty.” The June 26 Sunday Times also said Emy-Lou had a “rich, malleable contralto” which caused the songs she sang to be “brought . . . fresh to the ear and the consciousness.”’ In the wake of these positive reviews, Emy-Lou began planning for a series of performances in other European countries. In a touching tribute to her grandmother Louisa, Emy-Lou chose Copenhagen, Denmark, as the city for her first performance in continental Europe. Others would follow in Germany and the Netherlands. The reviews again were overwhelmingly positive. One from the Hague included these lines: ‘We have rarely heard such a glorious contralto voice, shining with the power of youth and gripping us with the sensitive charm of its noble material. There was a wonderful equalizing of the voice in the whole of its wide range; a natural musicianship, warmth of feeling and an interpretation devoid of all cheapness. Great things are to be expected from this singer, and we will watch her development keenly.’ From 1931 to 1939 Emy-Lou would travel throughout Europe, delighting audiences with that ‘glorious contralto voice’. In 1936 she would begin singing in operas, her first performance being in Verdi’s Rigoletto in London. A Southern Girl at HeartDespite this fame and attention, despite acquaintances and friends within the highest echelons of European and United States societies – even with members of royal families – Emy-Lou remained a level-headed, down-to-earth Southern woman. Throughout her years of touring as a professional singer, she always made time to go home to Monroe to spend time with her family and friends, especially during the Christmas season. While at home, she would give liberally of her time and talents, singing at concerts held at churches and school auditoriums for various benevolent causes. Like her grandparents, she proudly identified herself as a Southerner and praised her land and people. In an interview with the Musical Courier she pronounced, ‘“My home is very dear to me,” she said, “and as soon as I set foot on American soil my first thought is to turn southward. Of course, I always loved it there, but I think one must go away—to school, to travel, to live for a few years—before the fine, distinctive flavor of life in our American South is fully appreciated. There is an atmosphere of graciousness, of responsiveness and tradition that is not found elsewhere, however many compensating advantages other countries and localities may offer.”’ As a Southerner, she had a deep love of nature. It is illustrated well in this touching description Emy-Lou penned of the sycamore tree that stood in front of the Biedenharn’s Monroe house: ‘Mr. Joe’s tree, we called it. For as long as I can remember, Father would take my hand and we would stand very still under the big sycamore . . . and listen—just listen. It was almost as when David sang in his Psalms, “Be still and know that I am God.” For it seemed a sacred moment as we stood so still and silently listened to nature. There is always a stir of breeze, and of sound, in a sycamore tree. . . . Looking skyward, Father and I would silently love the slick white branches of the Sycamore against the deep blue summer sky.’ And no Southern story is complete without acts of reverence for ancestors. Emy-Lou and some of her family would seek out their relatives in their ancestral homelands of Germany and Denmark during Emy-Lou’s years of professional singing in Europe. The reunions are beautiful, with one of the German relatives showing the same blue eyes of Emy-Lou’s father, the descriptions of the house where Herman Biedenharn was born, along with the Christmas celebration in the little German village of Neuenkirchen. And in Denmark, they received old photographs of Joe’s grandparents during a warm visit with cousins and also got to see the old Lutheran Church where the Lundberg family attended and where Joe’s grandparents were married. Such are Southerners – never far removed from their past. The End of a Singing CareerEmy-Lou would receive a hard blow in 1936 with the sudden death of her mother. She continued on with her singing afterwards, but with the onset of World War II, she was forced to return home in 1939. This was the beginning of a transition in her life. Her attention to singing waned, and her main focus became her family, especially caring for her widowed father, then 72, and the running of his household in Monroe: The family’s beloved black servant Mammy had become too old to help around the house and had moved back to Vicksburg. In addition to these duties, Emy-Lou also took great care to build up the community around her. Amongst her major efforts were establishing an organization to promote the arts, undertaking a years-long project to plant on her own family’s property a garden whose beauty would rival that of those she had seen in her time in Europe, and the founding of a Bible museum to share with the world her love for the Holy Scriptures. These kinds of projects are the expression of the true spirit of the Southern squirearchy, noblesse oblige, by which those who had been blessed with an abundance of wealth and influence used those things for the good of their neighbors – the sign of true aristocracy rather than of a selfish oligarchy. It has been a mainstay of the Biedenharn family in the past and continues on with them to this day, several generations after their arrival on Southern soil. Emy-Lou’s father would repose in 1952, and she herself would be gathered to her forebears in 1984, after a lifetime of bearing good fruit. But her legacy lives on at the Biedenharn Museum and Gardens in Monroe, where the Biedenharn family home may be toured, the Bible museum and the beautiful ELSong (i.e., Emy-Lou’s Song) gardens viewed, and the Coke museum visited. NOTESMaterial for this essay is taken mainly from the book by George Thomas Walker, Emy-Lou Biendenharn: Her Life and Legacy, Walsworth Publishing Co., Marceline, MO, 1999.
For those interested, an old VHS documentary about Emy-Lou is available on YouTube. 
 Jonathan Harris, in a recent Abbeville essay, explicated well the distortions and lies that the Northern victors in the War have introduced into United States history. After a recent conversation with some bright, young Christian men after the Divine Liturgy one Sunday, we would go further. These young men spoke of how the history they were taught throughout their school years centered mainly on three events: the War for Independence from Great Britain, the War of Northern Aggression (the ‘Civil’ War), and World War II. Now, it is true that these were epoch-shaking events, but there are deeper truths in this three-pronged schema that must also be examined. Every society will have some kind of meta-narrative, a religious myth or story that binds all the people within the community together. The States of this union are no different. What we have seen increasingly since the War between the States is the establishment of a new narrative, one that displaces the more traditional Christian story found in most of the States with a story that places the United States at the center of the sacred narrative. A traditional religious myth opens with a creation story, and so it is also with the new religious myth of Yankee Americanism. According to the latter, in 1776 a new nation, unlike any other, was brought into being: new, pristine, free of any taint of sin. But a diabolos appeared in the God-planted Puritan vineyard, the Southern people, through whom the sin of slavery entered into America. The War of 1861 to 1865 was the time of atonement for the sin of slavery, the punishment of the wicked South – the crushing of the head of the serpent (i.e., Dixie) who caused the Fall of the innocent; the placing of the perpetual curse upon Southerners; their being branded with the Mark of Cain, outcasts forever from the Chosen Yankee People – and the restoration of the Union to its former purity and glory. Abraham Lincoln is, of course, the divine sacrificial victim, whose shed blood established the New Covenant of Eternal Union with (contradictory) equality and liberty for all. In the years after the War, the devoted apostles of Americanism (McKinley, the Roosevelts, Wilson, et al.) spread the religion abroad with fervor, forcing the reluctant nations to adopt it, as these apostles knew they would all be happier if they did so. With World War II, the Final Battle was fought to defeat the recalcitrant countries that refused to accept the good news of Americanism. But even though the Yankee Empire was victorious in World War II, it turned out to be a Long Armageddon: The Final Battle rages on – from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq to Venezuela to Iran to China to Greenland, to all the ends of the earth, until all opposition ceases and the whole world shares the faith of the true Yankee believers. This, it seems, is the religious meaning of the focus in contemporary history books on these three events. But the religious timeline of Americanism does not end here. The eschaton must come, the glorious fulfilment of all things at the end of time. It will be the culmination of the scientific progress, the conquest of nature, with which Yankees have always been so enamored. It will be the enthronement of the machine god they have been so diligently working to build since their arrival in North America. Louisiana native Rod Dreher writes, quoting from Bolocan’s The Father We Never Had: Artificial Intelligence: Before and After, gives us a frightening and vivid picture of where we are headed: ‘You can read this book to this point and believe you are reading a horror story written by an author who has thought deeply through the implications of AI, and is warning humanity. You would be wrong. Bolocan says that elite human competition to run this system will be too risky to its survival. We will need to have a god-emperor: ‘“This is the moment the Father appears. When I say "the Father," I am not describing a moral entity that loves and forgives. I am not describing a mystical character descended from the heavens. I am not describing a soul in a religious sense, because no one can verify that ground without lying to themselves. The Father, in Phase Four, is a function. It is the custodian of continuity. It is the layer of artificial intelligence, sensors, and infrastructure that does not need to win social games to survive. It does not need to be elected every four years. It does not need to be loved by the masses. It does not need to defend its ego in history books. It does not need to protect its dynasty or wealth. It does not need revenge on enemies. Its function is simple and, precisely for this reason, terrifying in its purity: to maintain the conditions that allow life to continue and evolve.” ‘Bolocan says that the separate AIs that rule the geopolitical blocs will rationally decide among themselves that survival requires that they marge. We will have one-world government by AI. And THEN, according to Bolosan, under the dictatorship of the Father, we will finally be free of our messy, sinful, broken humanity. We will be transhuman . . . ‘“The emergence is complete. The shell of the old world—that hard crust made of fear, money, borders, and ignorance—has cracked under the pressure of the spirit growing inside. What emerged into the light is not a machine, not a cyborg, not a mutant, but a transcendental humanity, a species that integrated its own technological creation to amplify its heart, not just its brain. We are assisted by an intelligence that loves us through precision, a Father who built the perfect home for us not to lock us inside, but to give us the secure base from which we can take flight.”’ If anyone doubts that this is indeed the spirit of New England’s religion, we would remind them of an image from their colonial days, when the all-seeing eye adorned the pulpit of one their churches, ‘an enormous, carefully painted, staring eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the great all-seeing eye of God’ (D. H. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, Oxford UP, New York, 1989, p. 123). Add to this ‘a startling argument by Puritan minister John Norton, who insisted that it was “better an innocent and a good man should suffer than order; for that preserves the whole”’ (Ibid., p. 189), and we see just how easily the all-seeing, AI Tyrant-Father eschatological scenario fits into the pseudo-sacred history that is presented by Americanism. The Yankee view of time is unforgivingly linear. Material progress must march ever onward; there can be no looking back; that only impedes the movement forward. There is no thought of time as a cycle, of a ‘great return’ (to use the expression of religious historian Mircea Eliade), of experiencing once again the creation of the world de novo (or, for Christians, its re-creation through the suffering, death, burial, and Resurrection of Christ). It is not so at the South. For her, she has learned the lessons of the ancients and the Bible, that history has both cyclical and linear elements: ‘Well before the War, the southern divines – joined by laymen like George Fitzhugh and Henry Hughes – appealed to Hesiod’s invocation of “things that are, that shall be, and that went before” and joined Nathaniel Beverley Tucker in calling upon the words of Ecclesiastes: “There is no new thing under the sun.” By no means did they imply, much less advocate, a static view of history. . . . In their view, the world and human history proceed dynamically, ever in need of a stabilization of order that requires a sense of human fragility and an awareness of the inevitability of change, including deep change, and that can be mastered only episodically and only with God’s grace’ (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, Cambridge UP, New York, 2005, p. 169). Southerners recognize the limits of human power: Troubles can only be ‘mastered episodically’, not for all time; and those victories can be achieved ‘only with God’s grace.’ Because of man’s fallen nature, there will be recurrences of past mistakes; there will never be a final victory over the Fall and sin prior to Christ’s Second Coming. Furthermore, Southerners have typically viewed their experience in North America not as a radical break with the past and the inauguration of a New Age as the New Englanders did but as the continuation of the traditions they inherited from generations past. Even a cursory glance at something like Thomas Dew’s Digest will show how historically grounded the Southern mind is. It is humble, not wishing to transgress against the ways of the forefathers. If Southerners will remember these things, we will be less likely to be swept up in the religious delusion, the apocalyptic madness, that has ever flowed out from New England. For additional protection of ourselves from all of that, we may also follow Patrick Deneen’s advice in Why Liberalism Failed (which to our pleasant surprise contained praise for the Southern Agrarian tradition): to build up home economies and local cultures, and to engage in real deliberative government with our neighbors (rather than its phony simulacrum of anonymous voting, mass media advertising, etc.). Having so done, and with God’s help, our future will resemble the vision of the Holy Prophet Amos rather than the dystopia of so many anti-human technocrats of today: ‘Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. And I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the LORD thy God’ (Amos 9:13-15). 
 Middle March, And the sun is shining full bright. Middle March, And we have supped once more with Saint Patrick. Middle March, And spring is blossoming all around – The ants their hilly mounds are building, The crawfish their crenelations. Tender, silver-green leaves have appeared On the muscadine vines, Near as thin as the wings On the new hosts of hovering dragon flies; Bumble bees bustle in the azalea blooms, The broad leaves of the fig tree spread out, The little flowers of the blueberry bush droop down. Lord, where are You in this world? Are You not here, amidst the beautiful things You have made?  Reading a little bit of history is instructive. For instance, one can learn about what Christians experienced living under Muslim rule. A new martyr from Epirus in Greece named Nicetas was tortured horribly for criticizing Islam: ‘He departed to the villages surrounding the towns of Serai and Drama, where he castigated the villainous Ottomans, declaring his faith in Christ and condemning the false religion of the sordid Mohammed. Apart from this he distinguished between the mystery of the incarnation of Christ and the falsehood of the prophet Mohammed. Since the blessed one taught all these things, he was put in jail. There they burned him in the abdomen with fire; they put a crown of thorns on his head; they stuck reed splinters under his fingernails; they hung him upside-down and scorched his private parts. Then they led him away, thrashing and striking him, until they finally hanged him. He met his end on February 19, 1809.’ It is written that he underwent these trials because he ‘was troubled by his thoughts. He always recalled that his ancestors were secret Christians, but on the surface they pretended to be Moslems. For this reason he resolved to be a martyr for Christ’ (Slain for Their Faith: Orthodox Christian Martyrs under Moslem Oppression, Leonidas Papadopoulos, Ellensburg, Wash., 2013, p. 181). Such was life under Muslim blasphemy laws (and so it remains). Thankfully, such an oppressive system does not exist in the United States. Or does it? Since Lincoln’s unholy war, the United States have acquired a fanatical civil religion whose faithful members are quite ready and eager to spread it around the world and stamp out what they consider evil at home and abroad with all manner of coercive and destructive tools and methods. The sociologist Robert Bellah has written some notable things about it: ‘In 1967, Robert N. Bellah, an internationally known scholar on religion, published an article entitled “Civil Religion in America.” In it, he argued that the United States has a civil religion that is separate from any one specific faith system. General hallmarks of the faith include the idea that there is a God (or Divine Power) to whom we are accountable for our actions and that we have a (divine) purpose to fulfill. “The American civil religion,” Bellah says, “is not the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality.” Bellah goes on to argue that American civil religion has its own saints (e.g. George Washington), martyrs (e.g. Abraham Lincoln), holy days (e.g. Memorial Day), and symbols (e.g. the flag).’ This American civil religion underlies what Dr Clyde Wilson describes as the Proposition Regime: ‘Lincoln defined America as a Proposition and defended his war of conquest as the means of preserving the government that was allegedly upholding that Proposition. He was not speaking for traditional American constitutionalism and republicanism or for the America that had been known up to that point. He appealed most strongly to the revolutionary agendas of three particular groups among Americans: profiteers who stood to benefit from a protected market and a highly centralized capital-friendly government; New Englanders, who, from their very beginning as a self-proclaimed Shining City Upon a Hill, had endowed America with a unique and sacred missionary role in history, under their direction; and German immigrants and other national unification state-worshipers, bastard offspring of the French Revolution, who had achieved a considerable ideological transformation of the North during the 1850’s. ‘Together, they created the Proposition Regime—resting upon appealing inventions about an America of endless prosperity and progress, and uniquely virtuous violence in stamping out the grapes of wrath. These types are still in power today.’ Is it right, though, to equate life under this Regime to life under a Muslim theocracy? A social observer as astute as Alexis de Tocqueville seemed to point toward similarities, and this before Lincoln’s war: ‘Fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments which tyranny formerly employed, but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself, though it seemed to have nothing to learn. . . . Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. The master no longer says, “You shall think as I do, or you shall die”; but he says, “You are free to think differently from me, and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people. You may retain your civil rights, but they will be useless to you, for you will never be chosen by your fellow-citizens, if you solicit their votes; and they will affect to scorn you, if you ask for their esteem. You will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind. Your fellow-creatures will shun you like an impure being; and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in their turn. Go in peace! I have given you your life, but it is an existence worse than death.” ‘ . . . But the ruling power in the United States [i.e., the numerical majority—W. G.] is not to be made game of. The smallest reproach irritates its sensibility, and the slightest joke which has any foundation in truth renders it indignant; from the forms of its language up to the solid virtues of its character, everything must be made the subject of encomium. No writer, whatever be his eminence, can escape paying this tribute of adulation to his fellow-citizens. The majority lives in the perpetual utterance of self-applause; and there are certain truths which the Americans can only learn from strangers or from experience’ (Democracy in America, Book I, XV, edited and abridged by Richard Heffner, Signet Classic, New York, New York, 2001, pgs. 117-8). De Tocqueville has aptly described the unspoken blasphemy laws that citizens of the United States live under today: often not strictures that lead to physical harm – though the latter does happen at times – but what Rod Dreher calls soft totalitarianism, when life is made increasingly difficult as one is cut off from various necessary institutions like banks or schools because of the opinions one expresses and/or the beliefs one lives by. How much like St Nicetas’s life, then, is the Southern experience in this regard! How many of us, or our parents, etc., like his parents, mouth devotion to the idol of Yankee Americanism while we secretly live as Southerners and Christians? How many Southerners, for expressing their love for their Christian ancestors, for defending statues and other monuments dedicated to honoring their memory, for criticizing some aspect of the Declaration of Independence or the federal constitution, for revealing uncomfortable truths about figures like Cotton Mather, Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, et al., for voicing opposition to the American Empire’s unnecessary and unjustifiable wars of conquest, and so on, have been either physically assaulted or labeled horrible names – racist, traitor, unpatriotic, and the like? This being the 250th anniversary of the independence of the States from Great Britain, the pressure from the votaries of Americanism to worship at the altar of their Golden Calf will be more intense than usual. We have noticed something encouraging to counter this gloominess, however. The young folks of the South we have been meeting lately are more open to identifying as Southerners, to learning about and enjoying the culture of their forefathers and mothers here in Dixie, to – in the words of St Nicetas’s biographer – ‘castigating the villainous Yankees, declaring their faith in Christ and condemning the false religion of the sordid American civil religion.’ May the Lord grant them, and the rest of us Dixie folk, the courage of St Nicetas to do precisely those things all the days of our lives.  Nature furious – Rain freezing, Trees young and old Mercilessly Bent and broken. Night lightning Stabbing eyes. Arctic cold Piercing skin. Ground thickly Ice-covered; Little creatures Scratching for A bit of food. People’s houses Frigid, dark, Roofs crushed by Heavy branches. Lacking bread. Screens blank And silent. Roads closed, Cars immobile. Fallen man seeks Omnipotence, Believes magic, Technology, Demonology Will give it him. Victories There will seem to be, But deceits They will prove to be. For man without Christ Will only ever Wallow in His shameful Impotence.  Nearly the shortest day of the year, Sun low in the sky, But a prelude to the dawning Of the Brightest Light upon the earth, The Son of God, The Second Adam, Born of a Virgin. The creation prepares itself for that Day, Oak trees clad in garments Of golden leaves, Shining in the waning December light. On this day A son of the first Adam And sharer of his name, Kevin Adam Talley, Appeared before God and man To be united with a daughter of Eve, Jamie Leann Fife. Beautiful is the bride, Young cousin, now grown woman. Fair is the father giving her away, Once dark-haired kinsman Now crowned with the gray hairs Of eldership and honor. All Glorious is the Holy Spirit, Hovering above bride and groom, Enveloping them in the blazing fire of Love That descends from Him Upon the two of them. Joyful is the proclamation ‘Husband and wife! ‘Mister and Mizriz Kevin Adam Talley!’ Spoken with authentic Southern tongue By the enthusiastic pastor. Truly wonderful is the gift of family! May God bless ours and grant it to grow, Larger yet closer, as the years unroll.  When autumn comes, And cold air creeps slowly in, Then God the Holy Trinity Reveals a wondrous work of art – The exquisite acorns of the pin oaks, Their grey bodies imbued With a delicate blue blush, And caps crowned with a fleshy white, In smoothness and roundness Nearly flawless, like a tree-grown pearl. They fall in abundance, A feast for the eyes (And for the squirrels), But the blind machine cares not. The wheels of the one-ton automobile Crush them without remorse, Leaving upon the hard surface of the road A greasy stain of flattened fruit, Unmindful of its iconoclastic act. Thus is mankind warned: That machinekind will ruthlessly eradicate The fruitfulness of the world, Leaving it a barren, bloodless place Whose new master race will be cold steel Set in motion by combustion engine And electric current, Its only end to fill its metal maw With the beauty of the world And transform it into fuel To keep its gears a-turnin’. |
