Guy Reams (00:02.018)
This is day 49. I am waiting. My week spent remembering the poets that I am grateful for would not be complete without acknowledging Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He was one of the first of the famous beat poets of the 1950s and 60s and hailed from San Francisco. He ran the City Lights Bookstore, which I had a chance to visit when I was in high school. I got to see Mr. Ferlinghetti there wearing his famous beret.
I was not old enough to understand the politics behind his message, but I was open-minded enough to recognize a talent for expressing words in an impactful way that had resonated with the hearts and minds of an entire generation of people. He probably considered himself an anarchist, but I think he realistically understood that this would be impossible as long as humans were bent on their own self-destruction. There are many poems of his that caught my attention.
I thought I would call attention to one of the first poems that I read of his. I am Waiting by Laurence Ferlinghetti. am waiting for my case to come up, and I waiting for a rebirth of wonder, and I waiting for someone to really discover America and whale. And I am waiting for the discovery of a new symbolic Western frontier, and I waiting for the American eagle to really spread its wings and straighten up and fly right, and I am waiting
the age of anxiety, to drop dead. And I waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe, or anarchy. And I waiting for the final withering away of all governments, and I am perpetually waiting for the rebirth of wonder. I am waiting for the second coming, and I am waiting for a religious revival to sweep through the state of Arizona, and I waiting for the grapes of what wrath to be stored, and I waiting for them to prove that God is really American.
and waiting to see God on television piped into church altars if they only can find the right channel to tune in on, and I'm waiting for the Last Supper to be served again with a strange new appetizer, and I am perpetually waiting for a rebirth of wonder. I am waiting for my number to be called, and I'm waiting for the Salvation Army to take over, and I'm waiting for the Meek to be blessed and inherit the earth without taxes, and I'm waiting for forests and animals to reclaim the earth as theirs.
Guy Reams (02:24.408)
And I waiting for way to be devised to destroy all nationalisms without killing anybody. And I waiting for linets and planets to fall like rain. And I am waiting for lovers and weepers to lie down together again. In a new rebirth of wonder. I am waiting for the great divide to be crossed. And I am waiting anxiously. And I am anxiously waiting for the secret of eternal life to be discovered by an obscure general practitioner.
And I'm waiting for the storms of life to be over, and I'm waiting to set sail for happiness. And I'm waiting for a reconstructed Mayflower to reach America, with its picture story and TV rights, sold in advance to the natives. And I'm waiting for the lost music to sound again, in the lost continent, in a new rebirth of wonder. I'm waiting for the day that maketh all things clear, and I'm waiting for a retribution, for what America did to Tom Sawyer.
I'm waiting for Alice in the Wonderland to retransmit to me her total dream of innocence. I'm waiting for Child Roland to come to the final Darkest Tower. I'm waiting for Aphrodite to grow live arms at the final disarmament conference in A New Birth of Wonder. I'm waiting to get some intimations of immorality by recollecting my early childhood. I'm waiting for the green mornings to come again. Youth's dumb green fields come back again.
And I'm waiting for the strains of unpremeditated art to shake my typewriter. And I'm waiting to write the great indelible poem. And I'm waiting for the last long careless rapture. And I am perpetually waiting for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn to catch each other up at last and embrace. And I'm waiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder.