Ein Heldenleben

             “The war is won: civilization saved,
            A million Huns lie harmless in the grave,
            And cheering throngs now crowd the boulevard
            As in jack-booted splendor we go by,
            Hoping to bury, in the cheerful noise,
            The recognition of our loss of grace.”

                                    - - Goodman, Fragments

We have built enough memorials,
For resurrection bursts upon us,
The frowsy dead their sheets unwinding,
Revealing merely desiccation,
Heroes in barest incarnation
With nothing left to say of honor.

With bleak murmuration
On the stark arid plain
The wintry monuments
Embrace desolation,
While the glib silly grins
Of the rioting vines
Erase every legend
Of each carious stele
In the green oasis.

We have walked the desert, back and forth,
Until the thousand steps were finished,
Each one a mask for grief remembered,
Each a dream compounded, forsaken.

Our dreams are flown, leaving dust,
Dust swirling in confusion,
The dry dead forgotten
Boiling around our shoulders,
Ungraspable memory.

When memory has no perpetuity,
Falling on leaf mold and other dead things,
Enriching the banks of the dark river,
The boundary of the green oasis,
A handful of sorrow slips through the fingers.

July 2019