Poems (Marianne Moore)/RADICAL
RADICAL
Tapering to a point, conserving everything, this carrot is predestined to be thick. The world is but a circumstance, a mis- erable corn-patch for its feet. With ambition, imagination, outgrowth,
nutriment, with everything crammed belligerent- ly inside itself, its fibres breed mon- opoly— a tail-like, wedge-shaped engine with the secret of expansion, fused with intensive heat to the color of the set-
ting sun and stiff. For the man in the straw hat, stand- ing still and turning to look back at it— as much as to say my happiest moment has been funereal in comparison with this, the con- ditions of life pre-
determined slavery to be easy and freedom hard. For it? Dismiss agrarian lore; it tells him this: that which it is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.