Revelation

We know what you are afraid of…

…the tide rising and the drowned world
on whose shore your life is wrecked;

…faces unrecognized in the streets at night,
callous looks, suspicion traded between you and them
the lasting knowledge of mutual ignorance;

We know what you are afraid of…

…all kinds of others in strange attire, in masquerade,
dancing as if to say you have no face, no eyes,
no mouth to speak with; you are as dark to them
as they are dark in your hopeless eyes;

… darkness on steep ground as you stumble home
from another evening’s broken dreams
where the soil claws hard at your feet,
unseen as the sky above the streets;
nothing falls on you but rain;
there is no light from heaven;

We know what you fear the most…

…loss and solitude, where the life you lived narrows
to some blind alley, every embrace a fumbling intrusion,
every word of what you thought was love, a cheap endearment
and the meaningless silence that follows it;

… hands extending to drag you from a raging sea,
you, the drowning sailor, press-ganged and jettisoned
as the storm’s confusion rattled judgment to a drift of silt
while you have no way of knowing whether rescue will bring you home
or, with clamouring hands, imprison you again;

Afraid…

…to have followed the herd, flocked with sheep,
deluded by an emperor whose trappings alone enticed you;

Afraid…

 …to have fallen for so many cheap tricks,
embarrassed, furious and impotent, scuttling
into self-induced captivity, enslaved by grand ideas
invented to drag you down;

We know, so well, the things you fear.

© BH, 2017

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This is poem 3 in a series of 4.  The sequence runs - Last Light Fading, Secrets, Revelation, You Told Us.

And these are things that drag us down, whatever wakes us in the small hours; products of a confusion fostered by our incessant pursuit of facts and the incessant delivery of fact-like things by those who benefit from keeping us bewildered.

Ah, yes, we have abandoned wisdom now, not for understanding or knowledge but for raw data. And we have no means of telling the first from the last. All has been revealed and we can make no more sense of it.

The image, well, what we have to reveal is just the contents of a rusty bucket. What else?