Second Coming No. 142 — June 10, 2025
A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House and his regime
Walter Holland
The Vanishings
The vanishings occur in daylight
or late at night
in schools or outside courts,
in churches or in stores,
on street corners,
old basements,
behind simple screen doors,
or off of a playground, or
in a car, or
at an intersection,
every day, more and more
these vanishings become
swift vanishings, vanishings
in vans, in SUVs, with dark windows,
shoved in the back
with handcuffs locked
until the vanished vanish in a plane.
The vanishings go unexplained and those
who are left behind remain uncertain
what to do,
who to ask and
who to call. Some witnesses say
they saw it all,
but would rather not give their names.
The men who came
cannot explain,
why the vanished
are detained and for
what reason they are blamed.
The men are dressed in black,
wear black masks of black netting,
have black shades over
that, wear black
boots and hold black
guns and some would say
they hear them laugh,
and some would say
that no one’s coming back.
Walter Holland is the author of the poetry collections Reconstruction (Finishing Line Press, 2022), Circuit (Chelsea Station Editions, 2010), Transatlantic (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), and A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992) as well as a novel, The March (Chelsea Station Editions, revised edition, 2011). His poems have appeared in Poetry Bay, Impossible Archetype, About Place Journal, CutBank, The Rappahannock Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthology In the Footsteps of a Shadow: North American Literary Responses to Fernando Pessoa (MadHat Press, 2025).
Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.
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Love the rhyming in this poem, and not usually a fan of it!