You keep your amber waves of grain,
your blue skies over purple mountains —
keep them.

I look out instead
at amber houses full of wonder about
this place they are in and whether
they’ll be standing this time next year,
devoured in a fire, decayed to falling apart;

I look out instead at a once-blue sky filled with
surreptitious smoke come down yellow
from Canada — or at any rate west of here,
north of here, south of heaven even.

There is still beauty, I guess, somewhere
beyond obvious trappings of pain
and fear: beyond sneering cracks
of Internet busybodies lost to laughing
at the innocent; beyond the tired pushing
of bodies built beyond normal measure
on the damn TV; beyond, beyond, beyond
in somewhere profound; somewhere
lasting and true to itself —

after all, this is America, founded
on a fingers’ crossed promise,
on endless compromises,
on contradictions and conformity —
on blood, always on blood;
red as a day turns to night and leaves it
gray on a sidewalk to dry and crust over
into brown.

Shall we compare it to a summer’s day?
Shall we gather by the river?
I don’t hear mermaids singing;
I don’t hear a strong guitar’s wail; no,
keep the song you learned early.
Keep it, amber that once was blue;
keep it in the violet mountains
where we look up
for something to save us
from the shit storm that’s coming,
that’s already here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
onward,
T