Poem of William Hermanns

                                 Vision

My pent-up forces
I wanted to deploy
to save myself and you and all
from the second Deluge,
from the atomic fall.

I send my eyes to the horizon,
they hit the walls of yellow mist,
I send my breath to roam
through mountains, woods, and waters.
Their breaths, too, cry for air.
I let my soul out to find love.
It returns like Noah's dove.

Asphalt of cities yield no more
a resting place
as the Deluge void of yore.
No welcome for my love.
I have become the stepchild of creation.
Nowhere I find my own.
I am voider than the void
and named, "No Where".
What a truncated Man is Adam's heir!

A flamboyant curse has closed
the gates to many mansions.
The modern Man is now in jail,
for self-inflicted bars there is no bail.

Man's ego is an ugly dwarf.
It piles matter upon matter,
climbs upon the heap and shouts,
"Look how tall I am."

This rapacious misfit
feeds from the tree of knowledge,
It is society's cherished breed,
trained by tradition-forming elite.
Society's ego runs the race through three dimensions.
Group loyalty feeds pride,
and pride feeds greed,
and greed feeds war.

Oh, glorious group-mind, luscious manure for ambition!
If you are imbued with politics,
the state rewards your climbing ego.

Oh, blessing to belong!
How the group siren woos foundering life:
"Come to us you thirsty, hungry egos.
I give you the kingdom.
Let your craving meet my generosity.
I'll set you a table on the mountain top,
no evil smell from sweaty feet shall reach you.

Oh, blessed state crypt -- how they come
and what they bring into the shelter,
society's boardinghouse!
Mediocrity, frustration, the whole scale of aggressiveness,
from slumbering to violent,
the whole scale of sex deviations,
from repressed otherness to open sadism,
and above all guilt!

The shark does not kill sharks,
but Man kills Man.
What an insult to creation!
What a treason to the breath of life,
imparted by the spirit
to you and me!

Oh youth, I am a living testimony.
How tradition makes bemedaled killers.
I too, had listened to the siren's song.
My flag was black, white, red.
Its ancestral glory waved over a million corpses,
friend and foe, with virtuous impartiality.
Then within the agony of Verdun's cathedral,
whose mutilated towers writhed before
my eyes. I heard a voice:
"You have the power to say 'No'
to tradition's plaything, death.
Remember, that the will to live
is drawn with Man's first breath."

What an awakening:
I shake the heavens loose
with my free will to choose.
My children's children shall not mount
the bandwagon of killers,
ornaments of history books.
Let us throw the chains of loyalty,
fogged by tradition's elite,
into the traceless waters of the sea.
What meaning has Man's dignity
unless his conscience has no chain
which makes him kill again?

Have we not all the same breath?
Does not each cell in us reflect a spiritual law?
Is not a mother's womb, whether French
or Chinese or German, a witness
to a cosmic plan?
Can you, youth, trust a leader
who says, "I will improve creation
by introducing in Man's consciousness
a drawer-mind: In the upper is
my race, in the lower other races."?

Oh youth, I am a living testimony,
and this twice in twenty years,
how leaders imparted in
us tradition's prey in uniform,
their drawer-mind: In the upper were
the history of Frederick the Great,
the teachings of Clausewitz and Schlieffen,
and the march songs,
In the lower drawer of the Kaiser's
mind was the Bible,
Goethe's Faust and Shakespeare plays.
No sooner did war break out
the lower was closed. Its contents
were seen again after the war,
until Hitler came. The upper
drawer by then had expanded
with Mein Kampf, heralding the
extinction of inferior races like the Jews.

Oh youth, our war-scathed earth
longs for you. Create a new
era of conscience. May you be
the chosen generation of which
will be written: "No longer shall Man
be ashamed that his birthright is not claimed
We youth will restore in us the total being.
The group mind of society and state, too long
fed by ego-ambition, has to wither away."

The change from the group mind
to the cosmic consciousness is
an evolutionary process.
Revolutions, as history testifies,
do not change a group mind.
They exchange the established mind
with that of an out-group.

Both minds have the same denominator:
Rule of three-dimensional greed.
The difference is that sometimes
the ruling elite is replaced
by those who felt wronged.
Man belongs to greed, as three dimensions to the flesh.

To establish cosmic consciousness,
Man must know himself and
his relationship to the universe.
If Man is made in the image and likeness
of God, as the Bible, the unsurpassed book
on the science of Man, states,
we do well to begin our investigation
with spiritual creation, the point of reference for Man.
To avoid Armageddon, we must perceive reality.
To comprehend the universe and Man's role in it,
we must cut the chains of three-dimensional concepts.
let us restore Man as an infinite being with cosmic awareness.

                                     William Hermanns    [P227]