The Devil at Woodstock

By Daniel Leach

Featured in New Lyre - Winter 2021

I was a mere sixteen that Summer day
We all piled in a beat-up car and drove
To Woodstock, or someplace we had been told
That a great spectacle was to occur—
An earth-shaking event where all the stars
That lit a generation’s sky would be
Together, like an astronomical
Alignment—all their energies would merge,
And give voice to the coming brighter dawn
We all felt was awakening in those times—
A spirit free of all the bitter strife
Our parents’ lives had known, and free of all
The forms of tyranny; the little rows
Of doll-houses in suburbs, where the chains
Of smug conformity, in silence grow,
And rigid, time-encrusted old beliefs,
That led the world in mad pursuit of power
To war and to the very brink of doom;
Again sat mute as merchants of that trade
Enslaved the beautiful Promethean fire
Of Reason to their grim and violent ends—
Yes, even as we blithely breathed the air
Of Summer’s freedom in those sunny fields,
Across the world, in steamy jungle hells,
Our brothers bled and died and went insane,
And only last Summer, our cities burned,
When the last one of those great prophets fell,
And hatred, like a cataclysmic storm,
Loomed over the horizon of our lives;
And though we heard the voice of our own kind
Proclaim the god-like feat that had been done,
As they stood on the face of a new world,
Across the radios and TV screens
Of our whole world, the weak and crackling sound
Fell as a lover’s words, when love is gone—
The bygone dreams of days that were no more.
For we were a new generation born
Not for the narrow realm of ordered thought,
The world of soulless men and cold machines,
And empty phrases that no one believed,
But piously repeated, just the same;
Of gods who punished or rewarded men
As they obeyed like herded sheep, or not—
No! We were born to be the golden ones,
Free from all law save what was in our hearts,
And free from Time, but what each moment gave
To pleasure mind and body without guilt–
That greatest of the chains of tyranny.
And so we came to the appointed place
And joined the thousands, walking on the roads
Like pilgrims to some mystic, holy shrine,
And I became as if one of that throng
And lost myself in that great, surging crowd,
Becoming like a leaf born on the winds
That came from where we knew not, but which drove
Our minds and bodies on as with a tide,
Where thought and feeling melted into one,
A moment with no future and no past,
Where I was free to passively observe,
Without the mirror of falsely judging eyes
As if truly opened for the first time;
And I saw many things bizarre and new;
The wild profusion of free-growing hair,
And every possible exotic state
And hue of clothing, or of nakedness;
And people dancing mid the Summer corn
To waves of mystical, hypnotic tones,
And odors of hashish and cannabis
Which sweetly drifted over all that place,
Like incense in some ancient Doric rite;
And just beyond the tumult of this scene,
Upon a path that led into the woods,
I noticed a lone figure sitting there,
With such a placid look upon his face,
Yet so intense, as if by force unseen,
I was drawn to him, and as I came near,
It seemed as if a gentle light played ‘round
His head and brightened with his widening smile,
And I could not resist a certain charm
That seemed to flow forth from his very form,
For he was beautiful in that strange way
That blends the essence of woman and man;
Long, flowing locks and penetrating eyes,
Broad forehead, and that knowing, smiling mouth;
“What brings you here?” he said, as I stood there,