Roger Waters Shares A Poem

November 15, 2011

Earlier this month Roger Waters posted a two minute video statement to his Facebook page, in which he shared his shared his support of the discusses the nationwide Occupy movement. Now he has added another political statement, a poem that he explains, he wrote "in disgust in 2004 when G.W.Bush was elected for a second term. Times have changed? I hope so! You are “the beautiful and proud,” to whom I refer.

The full text of the poem appears below…

2004. A Second Term.

Why cannot the good prevail?
Here in America there is at heart
A people, just and true,
Open, sometimes to the point of ridicule.
Good neighbors to rebuild the barn,
The doctor’s note of western legend
Carried forth beyond the grave
I knew your Pa, enough.

In caucuses across the land
Deliberate they’ll always stand,
Defenders of the Rosenburgs.
Symbolic of that yearning
To be better than before.
They never will give up their brother
To the grocers cold machine
Belt welts livid from the strong arm of the law.

On campuses,
In boardrooms,
Over giving thanks
And pumpkin pie,
On hustings, in committee rooms,
Whenever tyrants loomed,
We always held in our esteem
The ones who hold on to the dream,
Unflinching,
While the bullies
Pose and fiddle on the hill.

Has commerce so reduced the free,
That,
Blinded like a tot,
Contaminated by the dog shit in the grass,
We blunder, slaves to humbug, and this Texan dynasty.
NO!
Beyond the grip of trade
The young strain beautiful and proud,
The hoar frost breath of new blood
Needs but nudges from
The old forgotten guard
To scale the moral high grounds
In the clouds.