If - 2022

If you can keep your riches when all about you

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can enrich your coffers when all opposition doubts you,

    But make more riches from them too;

If you can lie and not be tired from lying,

    Lying endlessly, blatantly, and don’t deal with the truth,

Or being loved, don’t give way to loving,

    And yet always look good, never talk wisely;

If your friends can dream and make you the one to deliver;

    If you never think, and never make sense your aim;

If you can meet with Hate and Bigotry

    And treat those masters as your claim to fame;

If you can smear the truth that others have spoken

    And twist it further for your group of fools,

Or watch things others have given up their life for, broken,

    And stoop and stoop even further to break it in full;

If you can take the entire rich of the nation

    And risk it on just two of your chums,

And lose every wealth of the great nation

    And never breathe a word about the loss;

If you can force every established institution

    To serve you long after their semblance is gone,

And still, hold on when there is nothing left

    For the nation, except your greed that says “Hold on!”

If you can talk to crowds and make them lose their virtue,

    And walk with oligarchs and stoop to their legs to touch,

If neither courts nor patriots can hurt you,

    If all crooks count with you, but not one sane soul;

If you can fill the four long years

    With every second’s loot in the urn,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Bhakt, my son!

Photo of the Lily pond from the gardens of Claude Monet.

Footnote: Unconditional apologies to Mr. Monet and Mr. Kipling.