The Beast Come Round

By J David Cummings

“Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

                                                     —W. B. Yeats, 1919

It is born, it is here, it moves among us,
not as nightmare, the comforts of metaphor,
but in the real of time. Mothers are caged
and raped, girls are raped, children are stolen.
The children die. Close-watched boys are burning
their minds with the faces of guards, the dream of knives…
for the time to come, the time of blood and now.
And I am a silent grave.

On the other side of time, a poet wrote
“magic is afoot, it moves from arm to arm,”
and beautiful losers dreamed sweet forgetting.
What moves here moves by insidious means.
It slaves minds in high office and would-be heroes
in spineless talk, the aggrieved in an ignorance
of mouths, almost the pulse Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil.
And I am a silent grave.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…
but tomorrow is drowned. It’s made of infants,
remember? Bereft mothers and chained men.
All the past. Remember? When you knew nothing
except what you dreamed. It’s made of the utter,
consuming dark and the ashes of memory,
the songs of children, light in a lover’s eyes.
And I am a silent grave.

Writers’ Resist published 3 a.m. November 11, 2016 Turtle Cove Cottage Po’ipu, Kau’I, a poem co-written with my wife Christine Holland, in Issue 7: 12, Jan. 2017, and my poem If I Could Write a Political Poem, It Would Say, in Issue 72: 04, Oct. 2018. I have one published collection of poems, Tancho, selected by Alicia Ostriker for the 2013 Richard Snyder Poetry Prize, published by Ashland University Press, Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio. You can follow me on Twitter @jdc99tancho and Facebook.

Photo by Moira Dillon on Unsplash.