In this installment, Laure-Anne Bosselaar reads "Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau" by William Blake. Bosselaar is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf and of Small Gods of Grief, winner of the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry for 2001.  She is the editor of Outsiders: Poems about Rebels, Exiles and Renegades and Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City. Her next anthology, Never Before: Poems about First Experiences will come out from Four Way Books in the fall of 2005.  She and her husband, poet Kurt Brown, have completed a book of translations from Flemish poet, Herman de Coninck: The Plural of Happiness, which the Field Translations Series will publish in 2006.  She teaches a graduate poetry workshop at Sarah Lawrence College.

William Blake, "Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau"

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau:
Mock on, mock on: 'tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a Gem,
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking Eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And the Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.