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Cold Warriors

by Alex Chambers

The night air is crisp and cool.
Above, a celestial city stretches out in all directions.
The stars are streetlamps, standing sentry and
flooding their neighborhoods with an orange incandescent light.
Around each lamp planets circle like moths;
scrambling and colliding, elbowing each other aside
jockeying for position to bathe in uneclipsed grace.
They have no thoughts, only obligations,
but to live their lives hopelessly tethered is to them
invariably more desirable than drifting alone in the night.

Silhouetted trees have invaded the city. The branches are joined hands
blocking out boroughs and providing privacy to bashful galaxies.
They are brothers caught on opposite sides of a generational divide.
Students of different dogmas, but similar in culture, history and mind.
Morally uncertain, yet when the siren calls they still gather,
forming up into pleasing little regimental lines,
whispering predictions about which side would be the first to fire
and whose home would be obliterated when the bombs begin to fall.

The order never came. The oaks and elms are now cold warriors,
an uncrossable reservoir of hatred dredged between.
They grow old and proliferate, bequeathing not just genes,
but passing bigotry and contempt around the dinner table like potatoes and pie.
When their children have grown they'll have no thoughts, only duties and dead-lines.
When the evening news man appears they'll scramble and collide
jockeying for the best view to absorb the pale, flickering emissions.
Subliminal indoctrination maintaining the lucrative status quo;
with each sectarian manifesto the water level rises.

What would it be to stand on the banks of that basin when the walls finally fall,
to see the decrepit dam irrevocably overrun and then breached?
Crumbling cement and steel unleashing an unstoppable tsunami of renewal
raking trees bare of leaves, limbs and lineage. With annihilation comes rebirth:
those who had gained the courage to stand naked of preconception will persist,
those wise few who have learned how to look upon the flame, but not be blinded by it.

02/05/2009

Posted on 02/06/2009
Copyright © 2024 Alex Chambers

Member Comments on this Poem
Posted by Linda Fuller on 05/25/20 at 08:37 PM

I really enjoyed reading this - congrats on POTD.

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