"What happens to this wonderful beginning when we were all 'Poetry itself'?"

John Bradshaw, Homecoming, Part 1

Buckminster Fuller, one of the most creative men of our time, loved to quote Christopher Morley's poem about childhood:

The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold
Of being only four years old.

Still young enough to be a part
Of Nature's great impulsive heart,
Born comrade of bird, beast and tree
And unselfconscious as the bee-

And yet with lovely reason skilled
Each day new paradise to build
Elate explorer of each sense,
Without dismay, without pretense!

In your unstained transparent eyes
There is no conscience, no surprise:
Life's queer conundrums you accept,
Your strange Divinity still kept. .

And Life, that sets all things in rhyme,
May make you poet, too, in time--
But there were days, O tender elf,
When you were Poetry itself!

What happens to this wonderful beginning when we were all "Poetry itself"? How do all those tender elves become murderers, drug addicts, physical and sexual offenders, cruel dictators, morally degenerate politicians? How do they become the "walking wounded"? We see them all around us; the sad, fearful, doubting, anxious, and depressed, filled with unutterable longings. Surely this loss of our innate human potential is the greatest tragedy of all.

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