What Rough Beast | Poem for January 27, 2018

Day Merrill
A Valentine for Donald Trump

Red and white stripes,
White stars on blue—
I love this country.
What about you?

On this of all days, I should remember Love, as in
Love Thy Neighbor/Love Thine Enemies (one and the same).
For Canada, the US is a neighbor run amok,
hard enough to like, much less love these days.

But I am American, too, and my heart bleeds
red as the stripes on the flag
of the country I left,
but never abandoned.

The poets said it best: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
I feel like Yeats’s falcon, flung into a vortex—
buffeted by winds I might have noticed had I looked—
the falconer nowhere in sight.

Poetry is the only thing that saves me; the news is too awful—
the best of us lacking conviction,
the passionate intensity of the worst
a hot fire destroying everything in its path towards anarchy.

Poetry and Love, the love invoked by
the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar that drowns faith,
or leaves it stranded on Dover Beach, gasping
like the whales that let themselves—or worse—make themselves die.

There is an eternal note of sadness in human misery
now as then, and we are
tempest-tossed pebbles thrown against the shore
by unrelenting tides of woe.

Any yet. Despite whatever ignorant armies
clash by night, there is the promise of dawn.
Whatever rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem
or Washington to be born is a creature of darkness

and light will prevail. It may take many dawns,
years or decades of stony sleep vexed to nightmare,
but let us be true to Love and to one another
and elect to savor life’s joys while we endure its sorrows.

 

Day Merrill’s poems have appeared in The Binnacle, Halcyon Magazine, HIV Here & Now, Poems in the Aftermath, The Journal of Contemporary Rural Social Work, Tin Roof Press and Quick Brown Fox as well as in the Collingwood Public Library Writers Group anthology Musings. After a career as an English teacher and a university administrator, she became a career coach. Raised in New England and a former long-time resident of New York City, Merrill lives on the shores of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay in Collingwood, Ontario, with her husband and a rescued dog and cat.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books.