And Yet It is Not Consumed

And Yet It is Not Consumed

Birds and bushes, many wars, one in hand,

Kuwait, Iraq, all of that which is Oriental,

Blood from stones, oil from veins,

Sands like banks, dunes their timelocks,

Gushers like flaming flowers bloom on horizons.

Oh, but for the good old days.

Burning Bushes, engulfed from afar

And yet they were not consumed, blessed

As they are by peace promises,

Pieced together like people-puzzles,

Linked by democracies, mortar-pocked.

Beat down lands, milked and honeyed.

Bookended Bushes, one era ceased by

Adonian stone’s revelations: prophecies:

Two-headed Clintonian interregnum,

And yet they were not consumed,

Masking crusades behind translucent hijabs.

Virgins in heaven awaiting.

Shifting Sinais grow, stones to Mounts,

From Pharaohic captors to Sultan-Saducees,

From Mexican Gulf through Little Rock-Hope

To Potomac to Kennebunkport and

London, Bombay, Shanghai to Persian peninsuli.

Upon tankers and among clouds.

Two doves in a burning bush, grounded:

Two stones thrown from afar, patriot penury,

Setting free, empowering the stateless

From their scorched earths’ denied,

Starving desperadoes exchange terror for crude.

Leagues of Nations and two states.

Timeless walls destroyed, countless stones

Growl feverishly, pitched about toward new

Walls erected against refugees and

Devils in their midst, unleashed

By our own Bush-Stone tweet-state fictions.

Blowing trumpets toward Jericho.

Second-Bush, second-stone-and-’racks’:

Well-intentioned springs and falls, misfired;

Well-intentioned nonetheless, though

Intentions don’t un-fire missiles,

They don’t un-consume conflagrations.

If only we could take them back.

Now wandering domestic distractions,

Devils in our midst, homemade and imported,

Devils at our helm, grafted upon Bushes,

Molotov rocktails through glass:

Ceilings and houses almost shatter and truly  leak.

Collusion through acquiescence.

Deals, like art, are fictions and fables retold,

Sewing strife upon divided fields, security for

Liberty, draining swamps to rake muck,

Upon the bedrocks of an imperiled Republic,

Institutions in flames, alas brinking consumption.

And yet, we are not consumed. Yet.


Read more of my poetry, essays, and stories at Momentitiousness.com