Near Solstice shadows stretch from south to north
as if reaching toward winter. All violence
seems to come nearer when the sun lies low
as if it will not stand to protect us.
The geese on the river all avoid
the sand spit where lately the bald eagles
have left their little charnel piles of goose.
There are other places to go on the river,
though the geese must watch the sky for that plunging
doom, so breathtakingly quick and final.
And don’t we all, every living thing
I mean, wait for some talon or beak
to descend on us? And what of those bombed
into the streets, no food, no clean water?
Raptor force delivered with the efficiency
of our most expensive weapons. And what
long shadows will grow in the hearts of
the children orphaned in that rubble?
In the Sixties, we fled to communes, styled
ourselves as renegades, the underground—
but we were never refugees like that.
Thomas R. Smith
.