Stimulus
What I see along the plaza
A lusterless milkyway
A blackhole of a burntout Gaza
On faces fractured by Uranium decay
I ask the men
Reeled in past my 'stonished face
Help my disconnect to ken
The ravage of this place.
In silence no eye looked up
A woman travailed
A still birth of grief
And quickly looked away.
Yet while the line was reeled in still
The impaled fluttering fish
Caught me in the obsession
Of a wish.
I asked aloud
My desperation rising
Like a mushroom cloud
Over New Mexico,
At the Alamogordo Test Range
Eyes met eyes unsocketing
Recognition
Perhaps some emotional identifcation
On this landscape littered
With metaphors of fear.
We were once the middle class
Lured by bait and dream
Of white picket fence
And something to last
And for this we made
Required sacrifice
Sacrifice of children
Where no fire burned
Sacrifice of time
Bled white of rest
On the altar of the wage
Sacrifice of worship
And any responsibility
That served no immediate purpose
But a final sterility
Where the pale horse
And sickle rider
Have coralled our depravity.
Now there is no corn
Nor Joseph here
Nothing grows from irrigation
Of the salty tear.
And then the voice
Just failed away
Into a void fill silence
And some thought
Perhaps, I was wringing
My hands
But instead I
Scrubbing them
Insistent against the indelible red
Felt my throat
Grew parcht and dry.
Copyright © David Smalling | Year Posted 2009
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