In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment whenthey first attained the title of
‘suffering humanity’ They writhe upon the page
in a veritable rage
of adversity
Heaped up
groaning with babies and bayonets
under cement skies in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
bent statues bats wings and beaks slippery gibbets
cadavers and carnivorous cocksand all the final hollering monsters
of the
‘imagination of disaster’
they are so bloody real
it is as if they really still existed
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind
