to a thousand flea bites
that bleed me of my attention
to focus on where to begin.
I’d rather, in this numbness,
slide into distractions
and take politics off my list
of topics of interest.
Instead, my weary analysis is
we are the joke, the people,
who accepted this yoke
as it was woven
of infinitesimal strands
of compromises we made, unnoticed.
And as our journalists were bought
at a dime a dozen,
to become entertainers rather than
the brave watchers in the night,
in the bright lights
a pageant was staged,
and everyone watched the magician’s tricks,
and were amazed at
his slight of hand, in plain sight.
In plain sight,
as towers fell,
and war was waged,
and true tragedy waved
as a banner to follow,
our ideals were cast
like so many holy works into piles,
and set ablaze.
And here we are now.
Watching in fascinated horror
as two closet dictators vie
for the helm of our future.
And in our hearts we know
that a great wrong has grown,
and that either way leads
to nebulous peril.
There are precedents.
We are not stupid.
Written in history,
inexorable as the continents move
against each other, buckling and subsumed
We will be ground to dust
and extinguished
to be renewed again
in some distant age.
The ugliness at the core of each of us,
that we are singular and powerless,
prone to pleasure,
averse to pain,
is the intimate weakness
that brokers our extinction.
And while we could wage a war
of love
that might very well repair
this divide
is it so easy for a broken heart
to battle its own disillusionment?
In the twilight
a rose old in the summer
drops her petals
and does not swell at her hips,
as no bees came to visit her.
And a woman who works
for a fraction of a man’s worth
bears down in labor
and dies
because in Texas they don’t believe
poor people deserve medicine.
In Oklahoma, a man’s broke-down car
becomes his death knell
as he is gunned down
by his protectors
who claim to have found PCP.
Our heartland is broken.
As hatreds simmer,
fear builds a wall
and anger makes us irrational,
unable to center.
A little man cowers in the eyes
of millions watching.
They have hope on one shoulder
and desperation on the other:
to watch two facades trade colors and lies.
And this is the beginning:
a brave new awareness of our decline,
as tight between our excesses
we show our own true natures
as people:
Hungry, easily hateful,
blind or just uncaring,
maneuverable like a tool
in the hands of an infant.
Do we dare take ourselves to the stars?
~Anna Chlewicki Lightfoot~
