Canadian musician, Leonard Cohen, at once a dilletante of Eastern spirituality and an artist in more ways than one, died in 2016. His legacy has only begun to be discovered, studied, and appreciated.
His final album, You Want It Darker, was the culmination of a musical career that has a literary counterpart in a posthumously published book entitled The Flame. Cohen’s son, Adam, says of the final album, all the poems, the drawings, and the notes made during the last years of his life constituted “my father’s final efforts as a poet… It was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end.”
It’s nearly a prophecy of what was to happen within a few years of his death. The tone and themes of the book concern a disenchantment with politics, and a lucid vision of the end of civilization as we know it. The following is offered to the memory of one of the great icons of popular music, in his own way, a rebel illuminated in the art of darkness.
What is coming
ten million people
in the street cannot stop
What is coming
the American Armed Forces
cannot control
the President
of the United States
and his counselors
cannot conceive
initiate
command
or direct
everything
you do
or refrain from doing
will bring us
to the same place
the place we don’t know
your anger against the war
your horror of death
your calm strategies
your bold plans
to rearrange
the middle east
to overthrow the dollar
to establish
the 4th Reich
to live forever
to silence the Jews
to order the cosmos
to tidy up your life
to improve religion
they count for nothing
you have no understanding
of the consequences
of what you do
oh and one more thing
you aren’t going to like
what comes after
America
Image: Rama – Creative Commons
Canadian musician, Leonard Cohen, at once a dilletante of Eastern spirituality and an artist in more ways than one, died in 2016. His legacy has only begun to be discovered, studied, and appreciated.
His final album, You Want It Darker, was the culmination of a musical career that has a literary counterpart in a posthumously published book entitled The Flame. Cohen’s son, Adam, says of the final album, all the poems, the drawings, and the notes made during the last years of his life constituted “my father’s final efforts as a poet… It was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end.”
It’s nearly a prophecy of what was to happen within a few years of his death. The tone and themes of the book concern a disenchantment with politics, and a lucid vision of the end of civilization as we know it. The following is offered to the memory of one of the great icons of popular music, in his own way, a rebel illuminated in the art of darkness.
What is coming
ten million people
in the street cannot stop
What is coming
the American Armed Forces
cannot control
the President
of the United States
and his counselors
cannot conceive
initiate
command
or direct
everything
you do
or refrain from doing
will bring us
to the same place
the place we don’t know
your anger against the war
your horror of death
your calm strategies
your bold plans
to rearrange
the middle east
to overthrow the dollar
to establish
the 4th Reich
to live forever
to silence the Jews
to order the cosmos
to tidy up your life
to improve religion
they count for nothing
you have no understanding
of the consequences
of what you do
oh and one more thing
you aren’t going to like
what comes after
America
Image: Rama – Creative Commons
