In planning for you reason and free will

To fashion your own life in your own way.

For all the rest

I settled and appointed as for children

Their simple days, but you

I gave the Godlike gift to choose,

Who were not wise – for see how you have chosen,

Poor child, alone among them all now

Unhappy on the earth.'

Verses

1. I

After all creeds since reason first began,

Though it seems odd,

I'm still uncertain whether God made man

Or man made God.

1. II

When someone invented the rope

It wasn't so long till some other

Improved its use by inventing the noose,

And we started to hang one another.

1. III

Appearance is the world's test.

Brother, you're treated as you're dressed.

1. IV

'Man born of woman is a mess.

Adam alone was perfect man.'

'Aw, I don't know,' piped little Joe,

'He had no belly-button, Gran.'

1. V

Of all the ways to waste our days

Whose lives are short at best,

Listening to piano solos

Is one of the dreariest.

1. VI

'Prate not of God whom none has seen,

Poor dupe as credulous as blind.'

Wiseacre who must see to know,

You've never seen your own behind.

1. VII

Man's endless quest is to be happy,

Ever since Cain wet his first nappy;

Yet crime-waves now and A-bomb plans,

And Yanks turned Schickelgruber fans.

1. VIII

If Christ returned today among us, he

Once more would meet cold eye of Sadducee,

Security Boys would whisper and insist,

McCarthyites would chorus 'Communist!'

1. IX

Don't say Sir Boodle Blimp ignores the arts.

For golf his culture is both deep and strong;

Financial columns are his poetry;

His favourite music is the dinner gong.

1. X

All our lives my brothers, we

Have fought for a just equality.

Patience! At last it will be found:

We are all equal under the ground.

Civilisation

We who came late to civilisation,

Missing a gap of centuries,

When you came we marvelled and admired,

But with foreboding.

We had so little but we had happiness,

Each day a holiday,

For we were people before we were citizens,

Before we were ratepayers,

Tenants, customers, employees, parishioners.

How could we understand

White man's gradings, rigid and unquestioned,

Your sacred totems of Lord and Lady,

Highness and Holiness, Eminence, Majesty.

We could not understand

Your strange cult of uniformity,

This mass obedience to clocks, time-tables.

Puzzled, we wondered why

The importance to you, urgent and essential,

Of ties and gloves, shoe-polish, uniforms.

New to us were jails and orphanages,

Rents and taxes, banks and mortgages.

We who had so few things, the prime things,

We had no policemen, lawyers, middlemen,

Brokers, financiers, millionaires.

So they bewildered us, all the new wonders,

Stocks and shares, real estate,

Compound interest, sales and investments.

Oh, we have benefited, we have been lifted

With new knowledge, a new world opened.

Suddenly caught up in white man's ways

Gladly and gratefully we accept,

For this is necessity.