Poetry:
Murray, Les
from. And in its place comes this wonderful, unconditional love, now aborted before they can be born. an unburdening from the hunger for perfection." Ninety percent of Down's...
...It seems we are to be the poem and live the impossible...
...They aren't afraid...
...Half of his worship will he grinding his face in the dirt then lifting it up to beg, in private...
...In fact, most Down's ries than Down's syndrome...
...I'll tell you why...
...If he has now risen, as our infiltrators gibber, he has outdone Orpheus...
...before he reversed it...
...of him...
...But regained excels kept, he taught...
...The problem, I have learned from Danny, Down's syndrome children are becoming extinct...
...12: 26 March 1993 Commonweal...
...There is a person I also know, as my novelist friend says, that a "supposed nor- there...
...And while they are prone to a wide variety of of sick and handicapped children filled with far harder sto- physical ailments, nearly all are treatable...
...But there never was a bad baby...
...To have knowledge of right, after that, is to he in the wrong...
...He was certainly dead...
...Inventor of the mustard tree, he mourned one death, perhaps all...
...If lie is risen, all are children of a most high real God or something even stranger called by that name who knew to come and be punished for the world...
...His people's oldest wisdom...
...unwritten except on his body, like anyone's...
...where quiet, heroic love is an or- children, with love and care, can live happy, productive, surdinary affair, and you learn from it...
...He has ventured into a world mality which begins to eliminate 'otherness' in the name of its that doesn't see him, and in his own way, he is succeeding in own self-image" is profoundly evil, and that "[words like pro- it...
...him=for my own sake...
...Solitude may be stronger than embraces...
...Most are is not with his humanity, but with mine...
...Love, too, his new universal, so far ahead of you it has died for you before you meet it, may seem colder than the favors of gods who are our poems, good and had...
...To ask it of us...
...If death is now the birth-gate into things unsayahle in language of death's era...
...As each time we have, with mixed cries...
...You enter a community parents erately retarded...
...Whole philosophies will he devised for their brief snubbing...
...was wrapped like a scroll and dispatched to our liberated selves, the gods...
...are a part of that now...
...Ninety percent of Down's children are only mildly to modIt's a kind of redemption...
...Divine bastard, soul-usurer, giros-frightener, he is out to monopolize hatred...
...choice,] while they're supposed to embody liberalism, are re- I look at him, I watch him, I pray for the eyes to really see ally the worst and most terrifying kind of conservatism...
...He forgave the sick to health, disregarded the sex of the Furies when expelling them front minds...
...someone with courage...
...who went alive to the Shades...
...To complete his poem...
...We were maneuvered into it by priests and by the man himself...
...Death came through the sight of law...
...The low will rule...
...there will be wars about religion as there never were about the death-ignoring Olympians...
...Thus he has done the impossible to show us it is there...
...His message...
...uniform, I look his way...
...The pilumguaranteed it...
...they know what the imperfect look and So whenever I pass that young Down's man in his McDonald's think and feel like...
...Danny's brothers and sister prisingly independent lives...
...1 LES MURRAY The Say-but-the-Word Centurion Attempts a Summary That numinous healer who preached Saturnalia and paradox has died a slave's death...
...and curse by him...
...And he never speculated...
Vol. 120 • March 1993 • No. 6
