A Twenty-First Century Elegy

If there were a tomb to hold my thoughts alone where only those who seek it, meditate, guffaws would echo on the heavenly green; ideas will not live beyond their youth unless they catch the glint of steel beneath the torch of battle. So let now be the arena for my wars, my intellect, my flooding heart to charge at enemies who rise today but cannot raise the dust of my posterity. This very hour I choose to fight amid the phalanx of the white-robed clan. It is a field of bloodless strife where victors search beside themselves for ripening flaws to extricate, for keys to open doors that never should have closed, and for regrets that festered, unexposed. Then as a spirit leaves its body to embrace an unknown paradise, down at the end of that long corridor a dying candle flame blinks twice and gives its rising smoke to cense the larks above. ~