Poetry Year Day 6

The Grand Illusion beckons and is begone,
as becoming is becalmed in these the middle months,
between the bright strands of hope that pierced the horizon,
after eight long years of glower and gloom.
Between then and the promised land of better days.

Withering pale fire of fear clouds and crowds us,
pressing down from big skies and sweeping the plains.
The poetry of cold is in the bones,
of governor's to fearful to govern,
and Senators who are now, so far, far to old.

In a dream, I wandered in among the blankened trunks,
stripped of green shoots and all life,
leafless in high summer, frozen in place,
even as the heat forbodes upon us.

I took a twig and snapped it in gloved hand,
in vain, in vain, to see the shred of water,
that is the course of the living.
I crumbled the husk in my fragile hand,
then to scan the bleak horizon for a man
who might lead me from history's mire.

But I was alone, and the dream occluded back to night.

Give us this day our daily dread,
forgiven, forgotten, and for what we have made,
a people nomadic, at the end of a modern age.
Is there in the distance a fife or a drum?
Is there in the distance a light we call home?
Is there in this, the distance we have travelled,
a distaff branch that grows amidst the deadened trees.

A blasted wilderness, and we cannot even call it peace.