If I Could Write a Political Poem, It Would Say

By J. David Cummings

Are we fast becoming Nazi Germany?
Tune in, not tomorrow, but later today.

Let me confess to you my naïveté:
I thought the good among us were many.

Now I fear we stumble, prayer-like, as if to our last breath:
O, Dark Angel, afflict him who is the Anti-Savior.

Everyone can smell the smell of rancid death.
Everyone seems stone. Where is the Warrior?

Friend, if that’s an honest question, then stare
Into the bathroom glass: there or nowhere.

David Cummings has a published collection of poems, Tancho, which was selected by Alicia Ostriker for the 2013 Richard Snyder Prize and published by The Ashland Poetry Press, Ashland University, Ohio. The poems are meditations on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book also won the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Award in Poetry/Literary Criticism from the Independent Book Publishers Association.

Image credit: jamesr12012 via a Creative Commons license.