The Cleansing

Let there be no electricity.
Let there be no oil.
Let there be no dammed river,
let there be no steel.

Let there be berries,
no candies.
Let there be no light beer,
only mead and wine.

Let horses course the streets,
and dogs free to chase along.
Candles in every window,
no glass in any window.

May the houses themselves fall, the walls tumble,
may our crops suddenly spring from their rows
and run wild among our swift sprouting lawns,
tractors fall suddenly into rust,
cars flatten into heaps of ore and the insulation
on their wires flow liquid and nontoxic
back into the soil.

May every brand and sign vanish now —
no Nike except as victory winged over
the crumbling tar, no Arby’s, no Wendy’s,
may McDonald only be he who ran
the mythical farm, may everything we know
and televise be purified,
may we gang together and burn
all we have ever desired.

And then, what of ourselves
who know nothing of this new world?
What of the gods we discarded,
the teachings, the living script
of oracle and fable?

May they fail us as we failed them,
long ago. May we be unmothered
in this land we ruined as it is reborn,
and may we dance in fear as we learn
how much we were
what we once made and held dear.
It is foolish to think we could survive
without our artifice. May we shatter,
may we only be memorialized
as the Foolish Age that has passed
by the ones who figure out
that we had to perish,
if they were to survive,
that we had to perish
if anything
was to survive.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations