All Must Again Be Decided

22 March 2024

If posterity glances our way, they may say
we were craven, asleep at the wheel,
lulled to sleep by American dreams in their
haunting and chaste unreality, steady
as life passed us by. Or they may say
we strove with such recklessness nothing was safe,
that once woken we crashed into everything,
breaking the finest monumentos. But both were true,
and how these can both be without cancelling each other
remained our most pressing question. In some ways,
they couldn't, and each chose to keep to its quarters,
afraid of the great confrontation. Ideas, like kings, are enfeebled by flattery,
losing their warlike spirit, assured of control over this much,
no more. What happened when some chose to fight?
What became of a once mighty country grown fat
on its winnings, where none dared to fight,
when it woke to the clarion call of new gods claiming surely
that all must again be decided?