Auden

The picture above is from an episode of Futurama I watched with my boys. The robot, Bender, is adrift in space. His body is populated by ‘Shrimpkins’.

Auden wrote “A New Year Greeting” the year I was born. It was in response to an article entitled, “Life on the Human Skin“. I think it is rather fine.

A New Year Greeting

After an article by Mary J. Marples
in Scientific American, January, 1969

 On this day tradition allots
to taking stock of our lives,
 my greetings to all of you, Yeasts,
Bacteria, Viruses,
 Aerobics and Anaerobics:
A Very Happy New Year
 to all for whom my ectoderm
is as Middle-Earth to me.

 For creatures your size I offer
a free choice of habitat,
 so settle yourselves in the zone
that suits you best, in the pools
 of my pores or the tropical
forests of arm-pit and crotch,
 in the deserts of my fore-arms,
or the cool woods of my scalp.

 Build colonies: I will supply
adequate warmth and moisture,
 the sebum and lipids you need,
on condition you never
 do me annoy with your presence,
but behave as good guests should,
 not rioting into acne
or athlete’s-foot or a boil.

 Does my inner weather affect
the surfaces where you live?
 Do unpredictable changes
record my rocketing plunge
 from fairs when the mind is in tift
and relevant thoughts occur
 to fouls when nothing will happen
and no one calls and it rains.

 I should like to think that I make
a not impossible world,
 but an Eden it cannot be:
my games, my purposive acts,
 may turn to catastrophes there.
If you were religious folk,
 how would your dramas justify
unmerited suffering?

 By what myths would your priests account
for the hurricanes that come
 twice every twenty-four hours,
each time I dress or undress,
 when, clinging to keratin rafts,
whole cities are swept away
 to perish in space, or the Flood
that scalds to death when I bathe?

 Then, sooner or later, will dawn
a Day of Apocalypse,
 when my mantle suddenly turns
too cold, too rancid, for you,
 appetising to predators
of a fiercer sort, and I
 am stripped of excuse and nimbus,
a Past, subject to Judgement.

 1969

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