What
the Future Dares
… till the
Future dares / Forget the Past,…
“Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats,”
Percy Bysshe
Shelley, 1821
Didn’t you
wonder why it never fluttered or moved
when the wind blew?
“The Last Leaf,”
O. Henry
It wasn’t about Behrman’s masterpiece
or petals from the
sick child’s flower,
nor what the girl from
Kansas found
in the dusty back yard
where real leaves
darken and drop in packaged
rainbows.
Some few tout expired courtesies
shifting with Alvin
and Whitey, the boy
who could not run as
fast as his fellow,
porches posing bare
ruined choirs
where late the latch
key hides
unlooked-for tyrannies
among the stuff.
It preceded a resumed
cowardice
poising us high on
boards of water
to surrender the hard
won liberties.
Such betrayals have
always chased us
hand in hand from
pluming towers
on descents for later
repudiation.
When the planes
returned still pregnant
human cargo, attendant
baggage, fire,
did upper reaches of
the self-made labyrinth
sense fingers trace to
world’s oblivious center
trailing shadows in
art colony, belfry, slum,
entrance to subways’
prophetic walls?
They who passed above
our non-plus
entered that oblivion
a defining wave
of prey to revealed
contagion planted
in common furrow to
our sustaining
works and charities,
craft, invention, cures
for cancers,
tau-mediated degeneration.
Clear forensic
eludes. At Krajina,
Glasgow, Cairo, and
Tashkent,
the black sites render
inventive wrongs:
the forgetting in our darker dares coupled
with smoke bled
orchestrated immolations
to leave us rocking
spectators agape
never-agains that haunt but not compel.
Absent depone, the immolators emerged
striding mists
prefiguring such plumes
with diminutives
banned the learning places
offering throats to goalish stanchions,
stones drawn from a hundred hands
erupt of rain to wash
our culpable extremes.
Such excess tempts
more forgiveness
than found at
Gettysburg and Shiloh
reversing the rituals
of desecration
when dispatch to
rightful station
presaged approaching
railway escort
to gas chamber and
killing field.
It is here the daring
flickers brightest
through the
discredited inmost veil
threatening to torch
creation’s face
with Dream tales
shaping civility
through our
disobedience.
Then crowd shining
eyes to memorial steps
as less tremulous word goes forth
finding time and place
at Washington,
Tiananmen, Sabarmati Ashram,
Cairo again, now thawing in wind
arrived from lift of Tunisian night.
Generations ascend from their knowing
to relearn the debt ceiling of intolerance
adjacent the other jostling blunders waiting
to append fresh bubbles and crashes,
pyramids and labor towns, catastrophic
alliances with their ruined streets.
Blameless we assure sidestep of specicide,
of killing fogs, mustard hued precipitation,
fresh eboli sprung from canister or thicket,
mushrooming gales on waves of light.
With dam and inoculation, popular fiat, web,
kinetic kills, daunting ducts and bridges,
we thwart such contest to our sovereignty.
These number deeds like star voyages.
Though through genomic probings
man should breathe the breath of lion,
take on knowledge of scorpion,
wisdom that is asp, we fear not
advent of that strange and other soul.
Then may human reach to dust
and inscribe her perfected image,
speaking her Watson, new Deep Mind.
Then could human breathe to Not
the currents that may or not be soul.
In that ecumenical hour of awakening,
dull gaze lifted as from sickbed confusion,
what dread hand or eye will move
through gusts and any height demanded,
with brush or finger settle leaf among
brittle vinery, myrtle, or yew so fixed
it should neither tremble nor fall?
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