| -3/3/04
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti - Sometime During Eternity.
Given all the hoopla surrounding Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ
in the last few weeks I thought I'd use Ferlinghetti's version of the
crucifixion for this week's Beat Quote of the Week.
Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hip
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad
And moreover
he adds
It's all writ down
on some scroll-type parchments
which some henchmen
leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
a long time ago
and which you won't even find
for a coupla thousand years or so
or at least for
nineteen hundred and fortyseven
of them
to be exact
and even then
nobody really believes them
or me
for that matter
You're hot
they tell him
And they cool him
They stretch him on the Tree to cool
And everybody after that
is always making models
of this Tree
with him hung up
and always crooning His name
and calling Him to come down
and sit in
on their combo
as if he is THE king cat
who's got to blow
or they can't quite make it
Only he don't come down
from His Tree
Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
A Coney Island of the Mind, 1958
PERSONAL SIDE NOTE: This is the poem that got me started with the Beats.
I was in the eighth grade in 1968 and our English teacher read this to
us in class and then he gave us all a mimeographed copy of it. Being a
good Catholic boy fresh out of Catholic school and now in public school
I was fascinated with this poem. "How can you talk about Jesus that
way?" I remember wondering. "And what's with this 'God is dead'
business", not realizing at that tender age the significance of the
qualifier that indicated the "sources" Ferlinghetti was speaking
of were 'unreliable' sources.
Jerry Cimino
Learn more about Ferlinghetti by adding "A
Coney Island of the Mind, CD"
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