Hope

It's twilight, and it's autumn on this planet,
On my aging mind. The fit is good.
The nation also seems to be senescent,
Stooped and falling backward, balled
Up, moaning horribly. My fellows,
Bitter old white men and women,
Want the good times back. They want
To be the ones in charge. They want
The deviants and Spanish speakers,
And the blacks to scurry back into
Their shadowed realms, to stare in awe
At whiteness regnant, overweening,
Overwhelming, at the wheels of big
Gas guzzling cars, and breathing plumes
Of coal, the world as it used to be
When it was at its best, the world after
We had won the war. We don't win
Wars these days, of course. We fight
For years, and then we lose, and “we”
Don't do the fighting now. We send
The deviants, the Spanish speakers
And the blacks, the ones who aren't yet
Stuck in prison. We stay home,
And watch TV, and cheer on that
Psychotic monster we have made
Our president. The planet dies.
The poet dies. The nation which
Always was less than its uneducated
Citizens were wont to hoarsely claim
It was, collapses into to debt and
Conflict, doomed to perish, justly so,
The poet's aging mind decrees,
But poems end. What is does not,
And, underneath the dying thatch,
The millions of shoots sit, unseen,
The children, who are not quite white,
Accustomed to a nation that is
Ever more ambiguous, accustomed
To a future without coal, which
Won't use gasoline. It's twilight
Now. My days are numbered,
And the world I see is growing
Darker even as I speak, but night
Is cyclical. It does not last. There
Always is a dawn.



Poetry by Lawrence Beck The PoetBay support member heart!
Read 56 times
Written on 2017-10-27 at 01:30

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