Depicting everybody having a billion dollars is not useful because it is not achievable and does not help anyone come closer to a billion dollars. Depicting racial unity is useful because even slight changes in a few people's attitudes can stimulate spreading and lasting change in society.

Thank you, but it's wrong to think a newborn baby could perceive that.

Why, at Christmastime, must you dwell on all the racial wrongs? All I wanted to do is depict racial harmony through the metaphor of a quartet, where all the people, with thier different apprarances and voices, sing in harmony. The Chrismas quartet singing in the winter night is nostalgic, and I wished to link that to the prospect of racial harmony, which, by the way, I think has been achieved to a greater extent than you imply.

I am quite gothic-looking in left profile, and quite the modern poet when viewed from above and free from this tangle of sheets.

I presume you mean this as an example of mushier mush than your opinion of mine. I tried so hard to bring a nostalgic idea down to hard reality, and it returns as mush. It's like giving him one of those cute fish ties for Christmas, and it just hangs mushily all year til he drags it out for my sake. Of such is the joy of Christmas.

You still won't admit that my nostalgic image of a Christmas quarted composed of four races, singing together in harmony with scarves about their necks on a wintery evening is anything by stereotypical racism, will you?

I always know what I am saying.

After your wife-absorbed absence, I am normalized and racially content to find you back in the old style. And I do agree that another argument about race is pointless. Your explanation of geneticist’s contention in (1) is more precise than my poetic one, “But they were all the same race,” no argument there. But aren’t we really both saying the same thing?

I have used stereotypical adjectives in describing the four races in the poem, as you say. That does not mean that other adjectives could not be used, it only means that I was making the nostalgic point that each race contributes differently to the harmony of the “quartet.” It’s a kind of yuletide bringing together of the races.

Usually, you project my responses with some accuracy, but here, almost everything you ascribe to DOVINA, I would not say.

I still contend, not for argument’s sake, but for the record, that I am not racist. (Notice my initial comment)

A semicolon separates clauses. I suggest a dash in, "He speaks the reconizable - my soul."

If the meaning is simple, shouldn't the words be too?

They look at my dispelling of dogma, and read into it a faith that they say I have, but deny.

The "slipped hints of me" escape the rein of objectivity with which I try to restrain them.

Since the poem is not perfect (cabbage is misspelled) on what basis did you vote 10?

Looking at it that way allows some sympathy for the grandfather. I saw him as just a drunk, not particularly distressed over her death. In either case he should have considered the boy's feelings. It's kind of like trying to justify the actions of a drunk driver because he had a good reason to get drunk.

I am sorry that you have gone through such “a punishing schedule of introspection and self-degradation” to achieve “moral excellence.” You have, of course, in the process, defined morality to a fine degree of specificity; otherwise, you would not have suffered degradation, at the expense of pleasure, in obtaining it. It should therefore not be too much of an imposition to ask for a clear concise definition of morality as you have come to understand it.