More from Energy of Slaves
This is the poem we have been waiting for
n’est-ce pas
Much returns to us when we read it
which we do over and over again
It is not inspired
It took days and days to write
You are a detail in it
then you are the engine of the song
If only your gorilla was dead
we could be lovers
You cannot accuse my poem of helping anyone
You cannot use the tone
for the construction of a new thing
We like to read it slowly
touching ourselves
while falling asleep in the charcoal tower
after the terrible goodbye
We stop here and there
to put up red curtains or change the cats
but we come back
filled with sweet gratitude
O sweet gratitude
to be the ones we are
drivers of cars in the night-time rain
toward the adult restaurants and the toughest of lives
in Nashville and Acapulco
–
Crying, Come back, Hero
Now we’re tough enough again
to speak for love alone,
let politics go hang, we’ve
had our try with twisted form:
what good was it but training
for a summer day, discipline
to keep our manhood hard and warm.
One man free to love his minute
in the realms of flesh and sun
breaks down more pain than ages
of humane law or lawyers can.
Speaking softly one last time
let me say, You’ve made your laws
too strong, good or bad, your laws
have weakened many men, and I
would rather haunt cafes on both
sides of town than break my only
heart for your millennium,
my beloved falling through the numbered
arms of weak and weaker men.
It’s panic in the eyes of girls
that tells me I must speak for love alone,
panic at their empty beds,
at sanitary rows of monsters born.
1965
poems by Leonard Cohen
