Keeping the Flame

You’re watching video reruns from last summer. They’re lighting the cauldron, The Games return to the home of the gods. 2-minute snips between commercials: muscles grasping for a globe. And then the ads. Somebody’s running for something, posing & provocative under the national anthem. He says we’re at a crossroads. Flags & fireworks. We saw it all four years ago. Oh, but memory is a con man, he could sell you ice-blue riffles in a creek that dried up weeks ago. It’s August. On the news, wildfires are torching the hills. Come outside and listen to grasshoppers strike their splintery music in tinder-dry weeds, the song of summer.