the names of the dark ages are Ease and Lack and Tomorrow
they go in any ear as kindly as blood
and I am not to blame if I turn a profit
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 20 October 1667.
The poem imagines that dark ages don't arrive with a bang. They come with soft, ordinary names: Ease, Lack, and Tomorrow. Comfort, scarcity, and putting things off are the forces that dim a society, and the speaker says they slip into "any ear / as kindly as blood," as if they were natural, even…
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