The Treason Of The Intellectuals

The Treason Of The Intellectuals

Bookless, you have the one sweet narrow time,
Can know only your own brief hungry place,
Live in a dark slow-burning carapace

A wild, raw-minded unexamined mime.
The book-rich too are held in time's tight rime
To one-beat sentience, yet may embrace
Wide times and distant living, know the race,
See out beyond the banked effluvial grime.
So schooled folk say, with pride. Then tell me why,
In every age and place, the book-proud clerk
Colludes to rob and pen in the lightless sty
Millions condemned to half-life in the dark?
As dog to primal hunter, clerk to chief:
Fawning, he stalks, then guzzles, with the thief!