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