The Doings of the Powerful are
Not to be Judged by the Powerless²
Power is in Tearing Human Minds to
Pieces and putting them together again
In New Shapes of one’s own Choosing³
Power is Deaf to the Poems it commissions⁴
Get Out of their Way – the Powerful are Talking⁵
On a Reckless Adventure with a very potent thing
Way beyond our Comprehension – called Power⁶
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 Die⁷
What need they Fear who Knows, when
None can call their Power to Account?⁸
The hands of the Merchants of Big
Answers are Metalled with Power⁹
The Concentration of Power must
Produce its own kind of Rationale¹⁰
¹ John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos
² Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
³ George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
⁴ Dan Beachy-Quick, Stone-Garland
⁵ Nikki Wallshlaeger, Cloud of Feelings
⁶ Philip Roth, American Pastoral
⁷ Henry Newbolt, A Ballad of John Nicholson
⁸ William Shakespeare, Macbeth
⁹ Wendell Berry, The Mad Farmer
¹⁰ Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity