Second Coming No. 50 — March 10, 2025
A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House
Sean Sutherland
After the Election
I keep thinking of a time in the countryside at a friend’s cottage. Exotic flowers waited for us each morning. We warbled along to songs from the 30s on an old record player. There was even a room where you first had to make a bird call if you found yourself there, when the eight of us made the inventions of the others more lavish. What I left to be in that house felt eclipsed by a word from a lost culture defined as people up late who speak from the summits of their hearts. So that one night my friend and I formed a vague notion we are part alien, with a nostalgia for some other more serene world. In a slender child’s bed like mine, in a husky conspiratorial voice, he whispered after 1am that the major American river we both know well as a majestic animal of burden, in its nocturnal luster of barge light, has another river just as wide and many miles long which runs deep below its every curve, but fast in the opposite direction. In wonder, larger spaces grew between our words as sleep came on the deep river surfaced. I could hear the roar of that river as possibility, and if in the morning pancakes, coffee and laughter walked up those stairs to wake us, we could forget that river as if it were a dream, or let it sweep us along into anything we imagined.
Sean Sutherland‘s poems have appeared in journals including Atlanta Review, The Florida Review, Sandhills Literary Magazine, Hypertext, and Lime Hawk, among others, as well as in anthologies including Poetry for the Actor: A Guide to Deeper Truth (Smith & Kraus, 2020) edited by Deborah Hedwall. His plays have been staged at alternative theatre spaces in New York including Ensemble Studio Theatre, HERE Arts Center, and Altered Stages. A MacDowell Colony Fellow, Sutherland studies and teaches at The Writers Studio in New York.
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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