We Want to Make This Classic



Two years

Plus three months

Two wars

The ones we know about

Who are the combatants

How much material

Is left

To each side



How much longer

Even supplied

By the bigger thugs outside

Who claim

Defense defending



How much robbing

Peter

To pay Paul

And then Paul

Demands more and more

Of Peter



And it’s us

Is the idea

All us

We lose

We run down

We run out

We manufacture more

To say

It’s good for the economy

While the vaults in

Hell

Or waiting by the river Styx

Are the only things

That are full



And this become our legacy

We lose

Things from the Earth

That cannot be restored

Life in which

We had only given

Love



And there is less

The surplus population

Whom did we not need

And did we push them

Toward the front



Uriah-like



Of course

We wish it over

We wish them done

So we could walk across the fields

And say

This happened here

But statues

And they are meaningful

Fly flags

The same



By force

A fallow field

Unchanneled water

And who knows what

Congeals inside

Our natural

And plastic substances

To raise

Hate

Or something else we hide

Ongoing tries

For greed

Until we say

There

Someone made money

Out of this

Someone got a bit of power

Well

The illusion of it

Anyway

But that’s the best we have

In shadowlands





Expanse



There is the sun

At last

It will rise into the clouds

Maybe into a day

That’s only gray

Until the setting hour

When all these lines of yellow

Turn toward red

Then blue

Then black of night



It happens all the time

And is not

What’s happening

There are orbits

There are rings

Of different shapes and sizes

There are fields of gravity

There is magnetism



We try

To ken it all

To suss the meaning

In the measure

Or get a damn fine story

Out of it



Feature

Human interest

Sci-fi tome

That tells us where we’ve been

And where fancifully

We might be going

Out of these rounded places

Into an

Unbounded expanse

With only our imagination

For a shield





C L Couch





Photo by Krisztian Matyas on Unsplash