Rise, shining martyrs,
over the multitudes
for the season of migration
between earth and heaven.

Rise shining martyrs, cut down in fire
and darkness, speeding past light
straight through imagination’s park.

In the smart lofts of West Newton St.
or the warehouse district of S.F., come,
let us go back to bequeathed memory

of Columbus Ave, or the beach at the end of Polk St.,
where Jack Spicer went, or Steve Jonas’ apts. all over town
from Beacon Hill to St. Charles, without warning, how they went.

The multitude of martyrs, staring out of
town houses now on Delaware Ave. in the grey mist
of traffic circles, taking LSD, then not coming back

to rooming houses, Berkeley and motorcycles.
Books of poems all we had to bound the frustration
of leaving them behind, in Millbrook mornings on the swing
with Tambimuttu, excercising his solar plexus, during conversation.

Each street contains its own time of other decades,
recollected after the festival, carefully, as so many
bright jewels to brush aside for present occupation.

A printing press by the Pacific, a Norman cottage in the east,
dancing to Donovan, in Pucci pajamas, or perhaps, prison past
    imagination’s plain,
with Saturday night sessions in the tombs. Oh yes,

rise, shining martyrs, out of the moviehouse’s matinee
on Long Island, to your love walking by in the sun.
Over the multitudes, endless shortripping.

And backyard swimming pools of Arizona
and Pacific Palisades, in the canyons of LA, plus the journeys
over oceans, and islands, to metropolis spreadeagled the earth.

Yes, rise shining martyrs,
out of your graves, to tell us
what to do, read your poems
with the eyes of young men,
in springtime moon light.
Rise and salvage our century.

John Wieners (1934–2002) graduated from Boston College in 1954. He went on to minor fame as a Beat poet, though the label did not fit him well, say critics and friends. Beat he certainly was, by association and habits, but his best poetry took a lyric form. In 2007, this poem was found in a newly discovered journal kept by Wieners from 1970 to 1972, following publication of arguably his finest collection, Nerves (1970). Wieners wrote not only poems and scraps of poems in the journal but also the names of every poet he’d ever met, and he titled the contents “A Book of PROPHECIES.” In 2007, Bootstrap Press published the journal under that name, with Wieners’s mispellings and handwritten edits intact. The poem is reprinted by permission.