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Goodbye old friend,
it's not just us:
It's the time of loss.
The tree I pruned last spring
has shed all its leaves,
the lawn underneath dotted
brown and wet.
The first snow fell
two weeks ago
on Remembrance Day
when we gently dropped
red poppies
on the tomb
of the unknown soldier
the snow is melting,
even as the mercury
plummets;
The night comes sooner,
the day recedes faster.
The slippery politicians lie
and lie
about prices
coming down,
as the bread lines,
the tent cities,
and picket lines grow
like ground frost,
the situation is grave,
very grave,
democracy teeters -
and it's not just here,
they lie
about peace
on distant shores,
as bombs reverberate,
buildings crumble,
and helmeted crews
scour the mounds,
count the dead
lying somewhere inside
crypts of rubble.
2 comments:
There’s a lot going on in this poem. It starts off on an elegiac note. Then you move from Nature (leaves that are shed with the change of season) to artifice (the red poppies of Remembrance Day). The rest of the poem is concerned with artifice — man-made disasters (bread lines, picket lines, the lies of politicians) — which “grow” like “ground frost” and are “slippery” like snow. The man-made disasters are ironically paired with the change of seasons and the cruelties of Nature. The “situation is grave, very grave” … the poet tells us, and then the poem slides into a description of “graves” (“crypts of rubble”). The “time of loss” is not (only) about the ravages of winter but more urgently about the ravages of humanity in our current political “climate”.
As usual, you explain my poem better than I could. Thank you.
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