The New (Un)Civil War
For too long we sat complacent,
patting each others' backs, floating
on misplaced faith and a cultivated
cultural ignorance of the depth of rot existing.
We needed a weatherman to know
which way the wind blew, but they were
all vacationing in Palm Beach.
The straw men on the sidelines cried
"Peace, peace!"even as they pocketed
the bullet-ridden bills slipped under
their doors in the dark, while up in the hills
we never visited, gnarled hands loaded flintlocks with leftover hatred and nails
and on Sundays praised the Lord
with extravagant gestures in statue-less, dirt-floor, white-grimed churches.
When the unexpected gale blowing in
from the steppes set free sharppointed stars to crack our skulls, leaving nothing but an X on a rag redder than Miller's Cornfield we were caught defenseless in a country we didn't know existed populated by
natives who were not friendly on the other side
of a door we'd never even opened.
Though we speak the same language
communication falters, thanks to ignorance,
pride, prejudice, blame and the stoking of these
by those same straw men who had a hand in the initiation of this carnage.
It may be our grand experiment is, in the end,
a less than grand failure of communication, education, abrogation, taxation, narration,
expectation, conciliation, affirmation, calculation, elevation, cooperation, dissociation, globalization, disinformation, segregation and countless other iterations of -ations, the culmination of which
is not one nation but many and the resignation
of a bang, not a whimper.
just as a point of information Miller's Cornfield in Maryland was the site of a particularly bloody battle during our Civil War.
graveyard shift
the graveyard is quiet
the living gone back to living
the dead safely tucked away
stacked in brick boxes
above ground so wet
these bones cannot claim
their six feet of soil
our only birthright
i like cemeteries
especially the quiet
though if your soul is attuned
it might ripple when a sigh
from some still-restless occupant
newly put by crosses the invisible barrier
between what we call life
and whatever comes after
when this happens the quiet crackles
not with sound but with nervous energy
the kind you can feel in the part of you
that's indestructible
it's stardust searching for a new home
and though i have no conscious wish to die
i am curious to know where my stardust
will go when it's time for my bones to be boxed up but if it really is just the end
i guess i'll never know.
solstice
your crucifixion rests in the fields of heaven
my rope on rocks by the sea
the sand sings a song eaten by the sun
drowned in twilight's impassive embrace
the trumpets of earth
salute the damask heather
you collecting clouds a deeper purple
i the moon's raw pale smile
we dance on opposite poles
star eyes winking
yours the bravado of innocence
mine the dark shadows of the world
boxing it up
i am tied and allied with
the damaged
the crazy
the hurt
i want it to be
different with you
i'll take you
as you are
but won't
worship your pain
you can pour
your darkness
into my lap
it won't drown me
i'll take it
and mix it with mine
and shake it out
to dry
and
fold it away
in a box marked
do not open
there'll always be
more pain forthcoming
i know how that rolls
it regenerates
up from the bones
keep bailing
you're damaged
and crazy
and hurt
so am i
but
we'll have
no sacraments
to barbed wire here
we'll fill up
those boxes
and smile
at our cleverness
Most of Us
Science gives us answers to what seems,
to most of us, unfathomable.
Sometimes even the questions
are unfathomable,
so these answers are of no use to us
as we bend over, tying our shoes
and thinking about what must be done today.
Most of us already know what to avoid thinking about.
Politics, for example.
Every answer leads to another question
that leads to some dark place,
another dead-end, another secret.
We know, most of us,
the time, the day of the week, the date,
the month, the year,
until dementia strikes and then
none of it matters anymore.
Polymaths know almost everything,
at least in certain fields,
and are usually only too happy to fill us in.
But most of us aren't interested
in what they know, so we tune it out,
preferring, instead, the easily accessible
that allows us to slide through the everyday revolving doors.
It's so much easier for most of us to just
give up and live what we know,
as limited as that may be.
The seductive charms of the comfortable
are almost always irresistible
Yet most of us have nights when we ponder the unanswerable,
the riddles even geniuses have no answers for.
We toss and turn in the frustration
of ignorance until exhaustion lifts
its sledgehammer and puts us
out of our misery.
But maybe, in some hidden pocket
of our brains we haven't yet discovered,
most of us already know what we don't know.
RC deWinter’s poetry is widely anthologized, notably in New York City Haiku (NY Times/2017), The Connecticut Shakespeare Festival Anthology (River Bend Bookshop Press, 12/2021 NewContexts:3 Coverstory Books, April 2022) in print: 2River View, Event Magazine, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, the minnesota review, Plainsongs, Prairie Schooner, Southword, the ogham stone, York Literary Review among many others and appears in numerous online publications.
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