Blood For Wine: After Reading An Academic Poet

BLOOD FOR WINE: AFTER READING
AN ACADEMIC POET

“Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.”
“Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.”
-William Blake


At first I thought
his French lexicon
was a mayfly
trapped between Existentialism
and conscious resignation
of the inevitable.

On the sensitive side,
perhaps.

But no loss
of innocence
directly.

Of course,
I was mistaken.

Conscious resignation
has muscle,
as Marvell told us
over and over.

Blake is the one
who gave us vision,
surviving well into the next millennium.

It’s the Blakian
connection
to lexicon
that I hold dear,
like exchanging
blood for wine.

Alan Britt

Posted over on The Houston Literary Review