A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House
Michael T. Young
For the Last Time
Samuel Johnson said, somewhere,
“mankind has a horror of the last.”
So I wonder
how much of my past is tagged
with that little devouring phrase,
“never again”?
Was my friend’s “goodbye” last night
the last? Most times
we don’t know
and not knowing is merciful to me
in a way it wasn’t to
Hossam Shabat,
who signed his last note
“for the last time,”
and stepped out
into the Gaza streets, there
to document the airstrikes.
Imagine
closing the door at twenty-three,
knowingly, on every future:
with friends
and family, with fellow reporters,
closing it on the stars
and the stories
they tell, to sleep on pavements
under their lines spinning
all night,
and repeating, even after
he’s gone, his last message
to go on.
Michael T. Young is the author most recently of The Infinite Doctrine of Water (Terrapin Books, 2018) and Mountain Climbing a River, forthcoming from Broadstone Media in 2025. His poems have appeared in ONE ART, Rattle, Peacock Journal, Unbroken, and Vox Populi, among other journals, and has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac.
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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