Beauty Is the Highest Good

Beauty is the highest good
Virtue is its own reward
Kindness softens every heart
Beauty is the highest good

Beauty is as beauty does
Nothing takes from excess much
Elegance returns the price
Beauty is as beauty does

Beauty is a balm in sun
Radiance as well as calm
Nothing ventured, nothing gained
Beauty is the finest wine

Beauty is the pride of place
How we waken in the maze
Like the song of mocking birds
Beauty is the good of grace

Beauty is the highest good
Art for art’s sake, if you could
Let the opening number play
Beauty is the highest good

Beauty is the highest good
Ring the anvil made of wood 
Going, going, going, gone
Beauty glimmers like the dawn

Beauty is the highest good
Give it money for its looks
Build it temples, charge to look
Beauty is the richest good

Beauty is the highest good
In the starving rustic shack
Or the garret atelier 
Beauty has us by the hook

Love is all that beauty good
Poor or rich it overlooks
Evolution rides along
Beauty is the highest good

John Sevcik

 

Requiem over a Farm Field

You poor SOB.

I shot you in the sky so clear.

You weren’t old as I,

By 4 or 5 months not my peer.

You’re in god’s country now.

Forget your old home town.

We’ve planted you among the plow’s

Furrows with a furrowed brow.

War is like this, they have said,

That you and I are born and bred

From different bones in different lands. 

As we must stand for different things

Across the sky we spread our wings

Defending where we mewled our first,

Our milking mother’s mother tongue. 

Alas, it’s all just childhood fun,

And now we cock our guns to fight. 

Beware the church they fit us in,

Our pew of place, our fifth of gin. 

Now smoke is left of you, or me; 

It writes a different family tree. 

We own you now, your hope, your end,

Between the hedgerows, lost to death:

Our measure and our test as men.

We felled you here to bring an end

To war forever, wars that end

Before they’re ever thought again. 

A sunny day like this seems odd

For death and murder high aloft;

We both alive to fly, not fall. 

A different time, we’d have no fight;

Between us only cheers and stout. 

Goodbye, farewell, and keep me well.

Delay the airmen of the grave.

I’ll fly along some more and send

My good regards between good men. 

It couldn’t have been otherwise. 

We came from mothers on other sides. 

John Sevcik