Poetry

As We Know It?

He said it right there
I know it ‘cause I read it
About having health on our terms
Looking back at his age from mine
I can appreciate that,

But it was something more in there
Teasing out my confusion, got me wondering,
He said (softly)

“This is about the future of our
country as we know it, and 
may mean the end of our 
country as we know it.”

And I read, and I still don’t get,
How they yet are so certain of what
Doesn’t seem to be and never was but might
Be just around the corner…who knows?

Seems to me—I read a bit—that once
“Our country” (love that too as though we
All agree) had a soul, a welling inside, but
Then it went somewhere, maybe died.
Let’s say it did…I mean died.

So that’s a grave something to consider and
Where to start, apart from a wanting, would be a
Warrant, I suppose, of exhumation for the nation
Which would be finding some kind of
Justice not handcuffed to a stovepipe, a kind of
Seer, miraculous maker, to divine its place, and
What warrant, by the way, would have such muscle to get down

Under the putrid patriotic compost heaped all over
Our seeping, weeping soul and peer into its
Mouldering peaks and valleys.

And then after all this, what if, as she said,
There isn’t any there there, and what if, after
All this, it isn’t what we mean, not at all?
As we know it? Yeah, right.