Meditações - Time the refreshing river

„And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets 

Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss, O show us 

History the operator, the 

Organiser, Time the refreshing river." And the nations combine 

each cry, invoking the life 

That shapes the individual belly and orders 

The private nocturnal terror: 

"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,"Raise the vast 

military empires of the shark 

And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton? 

Intervene. Descend as a dove or 

A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."“ 

W. H. Auden, in Spain