The night is longest when it is sleepless,
the mind crowded with haunts and fury
draped in dark shadow and ominous
as the ghosts of futures-yet-to-be
that point bone-white fingers
from dream’s dark corner and
leave one breathless,
tongueless,
voiceless,
hopeless
to cry out at the mounting pressure
and injustice of storms and heat
and glaciers’ retreat and rising tides
and seas blooming plastic
and forests denuded and deprived
of creatures great and small,
and all all all
rewritten and twisted and undone
in service to short-term metrics
that measure life elemental
against gains —
immediate,
concrete —
of dollars and cents
as if a blue-green shiny new earth
might be bought and sold and regrown
by stocks and bonds and war and walls
and oil and coal alone. . .
The night is longest when it is sleepless,
interrupted by dreams of ink-writ
skeletal wraiths that inhale
one’s choked-silent pleas of
“There!
Right there!
Does no one
see?”
— C.Birde, 8/19
