Joseph D. Milosch

Last Word on the Election

Yes, on the day after the election,

everything seemed to be slipping

to the brink. We are on the edge

of destruction, not by fire, water,

starvation, invasion by foreign powers,

COVID-19, plague, cancer,

heart failure, or stroke.

Yes, we seem to stand on the lip

of an abyss, and instead of finding

the beautiful architecture of the body

or love, we expose ourselves

to malicious behavior.

We hope everything will be all right

because we think others are better.

But in retrospect,

we should have prayed

to be spared that one quick moment

when what we suspected

about our country

but were unwilling to face

was revealed.

 

Hard Not to Fear the Weight of the Earth

It would have been better for this poet

to have been born in a doorless room

than to see his country reinstall segregation.

It would have been better

to squander his childhood in corners,

filled with dreams of roses

pinned in long silky hair —

better for him to chop his childhood memories

into slivers of wood and start

a fire beneath the white cylinder

used to heat water in the room

of his recuring dream —

the one with images of knotted ropes

dangling from cliff trees.

It would have been better to find himself

in another dream, wandering the streets

and writing his poems behind the faces,

painted on the undersides of bridges;

then to see the unmasking of

in-your-face hatred.

Today, no one can pretend

to be above it all anymore,

and our poems need trapdoors,

leading to underground tunnels —

identified by skeletons nailed upright

with mouths full of worms.

Today he writes of rivers and creeks,

because he can hardly bear to think

of the new fascism that is heavy

like the mountains, and makes

it hard not to fear the earth’s weight.

Did the Dao say, everywhere man

is dust and death, and his groaning

is wind in a seashell?’

It doesn’t matter for in this time

of the new red and black

there is no way to know

if his country will survive

or if the doors of poetry are closing.

 

A Dark Sky Over the White-Capped Pacific

I stopped at an overlook along the Oregon coast.

In the sky, puffins and cormorants dipped and darted.

Further out, the rain clouds ballooned.

The wind kept knocking the top off waves,

and I saw the sea struggling while birds

dived behind a rocky cliff.

I slept deeply that night, and beyond my room,

clouds hid the stars like a squadron following fog

across the border.

Rain on the roof became footsteps of sorrow

that entered my sleep and called itself by another name.

In my dream, the waves of memory rippled;

and a man didn’t dare show his face as he glided

in the shadows of a fence. Then, an elevator

opened its door invitingly,

and I crashed through charcoal depths, feeling someone

behind me. Who was bigger than my shadow, and

his face was a kaleidoscope of troops and their fears.

Some dreams fulfill desires, but the rush

of fascistic-patriotism fills the seas with blood.