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.
Poems (Egoist Press, 1921) by Marianne Moore. Copyright © 1921 by Marianne Moore. This poem is in the public domain.