13 Comments
User's avatar
Emeline Diener's avatar

I’m overwhelmed by this. Kipling would be proud. Thank you.

Expand full comment
Freedman's avatar

This is the first time i have ever been captivated by poem. And may be he first time I have left a comment.

Expand full comment
Matthew's avatar

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?”

Expand full comment
Halftrolling's avatar

“White man unburdened”

Expand full comment
Dumb Pollock's avatar

What a beautiful poem. And as sharp as tiger's bloody fangs!

Expand full comment
Scott Denver's avatar

Damn! Did you just find Kipling's part II

Expand full comment
Lost Crusader's avatar

Banger

Expand full comment
Luke's avatar

Nice poem!

Expand full comment
Warmek's avatar

Yours? Well done. I think this couplet might scan better against the immediately prior as:

"He who at Troy did conquer

will not beg in his own halls."

Sorry. Compulsive editor.

Expand full comment
Kulak's avatar

Actually ya you're correct. Thankyou!

There's a lot of intentional scanning oddities to create the shifting tone (think of the rhythm how once moves while carrying a great weight vs not carrying one)... That's one that didn't get changed when I rearranged the stanzas.

Expand full comment
Warmek's avatar

I mean, it was pretty darn solid, and certainly better than I could have done. I'm a far better editor than author, I've found. ;)

Inspired me to go and re-read the original, and also my very *favorite* Kipling, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings".

While I understand the tone and feeling being expressed by it, I do fear that the use of the ethnic slur will limit the reach of the work to people -- even people who might otherwise find significant agreement with it -- who reflexively shy away from such things. Though perhaps that's just my own burned hand talking, having in the past used the term to attempt to make a point of my own, and having had basically everyone completely ignore the point in favor of yelling at me over the means I used to make it. Certainly, its presence here has radically narrowed the scope of who I felt I could share it with.

Essentially what I'm trying to say is that I feel as though your use of "nigger" here may be counterproductive. As a society, we would need to be vastly farther along the path of deacculturating people of the notion of hate speech before it wouldn't cause a great number of people to instinctively reject the message, which I think is a good one.

And, there's my free (as in beer) opinion on the internet, worth everything you paid for it. ;)

Expand full comment
Adûnâi's avatar

This is very anti-Christian. It is the correct Feind-Erkennung to designate the Jewish angel of mercy Jesus as the archenemy of the Aryans. The correct question to ask is why Japan is still settled by the Mongoloids after the Americans conquered their pristine land in 1945. If you don't covet good soil, you are a cuck. See The Ukraine in Flames by Dovjenko.

Expand full comment
Trumpanagan's avatar

The white man's burden referred to Christians (protestant heretics at that).

I believe now it is the hooknose's burden. Those little cap spawns of Satan. And they can't bare their own gayness. Let alone accept any burden.

Kipling was a colonial, Inja old chap. But, I'm in Canada, Inja old chap....

Come to think of it I don't know what is happening.

Expand full comment