Like No Angel

21 February 2023

Wandering homeward, overland
past German towns destroyed
by too-free thought, past English
clocks unwound and French hearts
broken-hearted, stands a man,
not quite your size, some large
American, unsteady on his feet.
He knows too little, feels too much,
but means to help in any way he can.
He feared one day
the old world would cave in
and need the new. It never did. Instead
it hardened into something like itself,
with just a thin veneer of tolerance. And so
it wandered, as he too would wander,
homeward, like no angel one had ever seen.