LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

The poet is introduced to life that is strange and apart from his subjective nourishment. That life preens for attention and veers off to the gathering in the distant park; life instinct rides from the clouds and penetrates the iron-grey earth that is open, waiting to receive the fallen spirit.

Strange and apart, yet so common that it dumbly strikes him that this is reality, that he has entered the fray without any knowledge and is sent to the rear to listen, again, to the heart of the wild periphery. Chains and the smell of smoke fill him with a premonition of the oppressed at their windows looking down across the small street where old women pull shopping carts. They are moving at the pace of their dreams and believe that God is just. God is just and they will rule heaven over all of those who have hurt them in their inglorious lives. They see the other as predators ready to swoop down at any moment.

Gangs, primed against the predators, test themselves by absorbing the good in the environment and transforming it into the bad. Ah, the potential for the good is here but we know the secret signs that paralyze the good; reverse it toward a sink where the many-eyed beasts slake their thirst for mayhem.

The poet observes it, in shock that the process is so efficient. "Where are the aspirations upward, toward the largest and most irrational of goals?"