Heaven is broken:
Two shards of sky at our feet,
Not a gift from any god,
Just Mammon’s ire,
Parted like spectral light
Churned through a quartz prism.
I rode out at day in an open car,
Hood down, to take the sun,
To feel the wind blow
Over the windscreen glass.
This is now, I said, a time when affability
Is as much use as a cheap watch
So my long-dead father would have said
In his language of war, in his own way, wise.
Yes, now, when traffic lunges over
Buttressed roads so big, so impassable,
Cities so full the hills beyond are distant
Green scars beneath the cloud.
Now.
We can call America on a screen.
We speak, seeing faces, hearing voices
in the room beside us,
This is our unbelievable now.
Looking back - days of crude engines
Carts and bogeys - days of electricity
Brightening the home and no more -
These are history.
Now. Today,
We fire a laser up to heaven,
Peer at stars farther off than time itself,
Spy on decent folk, hover like raptors
Beyond their sight - for their own good.
Oh, now.
What have we become?
What have we made ourselves become?
To God, the joy of my youth:
Why hast Thou forsaken me,
In thought, in word and deed?
I’ve taken sections from this longer work before. Still not ready to share as a whole but this fragment seem to hang together at last - with a light edit.
Two shards of sky at our feet,
Not a gift from any god,
Just Mammon’s ire,
Parted like spectral light
Churned through a quartz prism.
I rode out at day in an open car,
Hood down, to take the sun,
To feel the wind blow
Over the windscreen glass.
This is now, I said, a time when affability
Is as much use as a cheap watch
So my long-dead father would have said
In his language of war, in his own way, wise.
Yes, now, when traffic lunges over
Buttressed roads so big, so impassable,
Cities so full the hills beyond are distant
Green scars beneath the cloud.
Now.
We can call America on a screen.
We speak, seeing faces, hearing voices
in the room beside us,
This is our unbelievable now.
Looking back - days of crude engines
Carts and bogeys - days of electricity
Brightening the home and no more -
These are history.
Now. Today,
We fire a laser up to heaven,
Peer at stars farther off than time itself,
Spy on decent folk, hover like raptors
Beyond their sight - for their own good.
Oh, now.
What have we become?
What have we made ourselves become?
To God, the joy of my youth:
Why hast Thou forsaken me,
In thought, in word and deed?
© BH, 2016/2022
I’ve taken sections from this longer work before. Still not ready to share as a whole but this fragment seem to hang together at last - with a light edit.
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