One could be forgiven for asking what poetry, with its self-indulgence, its insistence on image and metaphor, can do for the real world of blood and bruises, the harsh dirt with which we bury the newly dead. In his poem In […]
It’s Fall on an even-numbered year
which means an election looms, again.
We wander pumpkin patches, corn mazes, haunted
houses, make holiday plans, think what gifts to give.
We are all mourners now, our clothes
funeral shrouds we tear off our backs
when the time comes (and it will come);
in one pocket we carry brushes for tidying
the graves we stumble on in schools, churches,
nightclubs, concerts, grocery stores, streetcorners…
Not much that goes viral is true
(what passes for truth these days?);
but let’s keep this between me and you.
Find joy in the little things:
the glint of rust on flagpoles at dawn,
or squeak of shoes on desecrated marble.
Imperfections I’d given up on.
How lovely it would be to live in a nation where
poetry put down insurrections. Then I might bang out
this stanza and go sue a wolf for stealing the moon.
At last I’m free to visit Church today;
What State dare silence this ecstatic hymn?
Hallelujah, O Lord, how oft we pray
to be free—and now we’re free! Yet we brim
I try on a suit to look handsome for the moon
ask the mirror what I’ve gained and what I’ve lost.
I mourn the death of those yet to die,
seek an urn to hold the ashes of what might have been.
Even the dead weep for our isolation;
in the pit of night, I dream of you at my
side, bleary-eyed, maskless. We stare
out the same window at the same desolation.
Is it too late for things that hope to grow?
What does it say that the sapling’s leaves
have already turned?