LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

The poets' loneliness is like a shield laying on top of a tired soldier who dreams of beautiful women, who dream of flying through the unconquered and free universe, who dreams of cities that have never existed but will exist in the future, who dream that all his dead comrades talk to him and ensure him that peace follows death. At this moment the shield moves so that a dart of sun penetrates the sleeping soldier and he awakes to find himself in a hungry desert that contains three other people. And he knows, instantly, that he and the others have been abandoned and sent out to die. He remembers it all as the consecutive dream images fade one by one. And the soldier, still tired, realizes that his best fights are still in him. And then the most bitter of realizations. He's been abandoned for purely political reasons; something out of his control.