The doings of the powerful are
Not to be judged by the Powerless.²
Get out of their way—the Powerful are talking!³
Power is deaf to the Poems it commissions …⁴
The hands of the Merchants of
Big Answers are metalled with power.⁵
We’re on a reckless adventure with a very potent thing
Way beyond our Comprehension—called Power.⁶
Power is in tearing Human Minds to pieces
And putting them together again in
New shapes of one’s own choosing.⁷
The Concentration of power must
Produce its own kind of Rationale.⁸
What need they fear who Knows,
When none can call their Power to account?⁹
Have ye served them for a hundred years
And yet ye know not Why?
They brook no doubt of their Mastery:
They’ll Rule until they Die!¹⁰
¹ John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos
² Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
³ Nikki Wallshlaeger, Cloud of Feelings
⁴ Dan Beachy-Quick, Stone-Garland
⁵ Wendell Berry, The Mad Farmer
⁶ Philip Roth, American Pastoral
⁷ George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
⁸ Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity
⁹ William Shakespeare, Macbeth
¹⁰ Henry Newbolt, A Ballad of John Nicholson