It was a bleak winter morning,
too cold to go outside.
I sat by the window
and watched people
struggling to walk
on the icy sidewalks.
I had a strange feeling
of detachment from the scene
and started visualizing
Washington’s weary troops
withstanding the bitter winter
at Valley Forge,
Napolean’s freezing soldiers
plodding for home
from Moscow
in the deep snow
falling by the wayside,
the German army
stalled at Stalingrad
battle worn, thousands dead,
forced to surrender
to die in prison camps.
A blaring car horn
brings me back to the present
and I idly watch
Mr. Road Rage
get out of his car
and assault an old woman
who dared to cross his street
and make him wait.
I was halfway through the turnstile
when something moved beside me.
It was a man
beating the fare,
jumping the turnstile.
I managed not to trip
when he dashed past me.
I started to curse him,
saw he was bigger than me
and shut my mouth,
one more morning event
on the way to work.
To some
obsolete objects
of no consequence.
To the technically evolved
electronic portal
to accessible data.
The mystery
huddling under the concealing covers
flashlight in hand,
pacing the cell with Edmond Dantes,
mushing Buck on Alaskan trails,
drawing my sword with D’Artagnan,
eyeing Ahab with wonder,
quite possessed me.
So many escapes
from harsh reality
I was powerless to control,
brief comfort
in compelling discoveries.
As I grew up
the books grew up,
great poets, playwrights,
storytellers, historians,
Thucydides,
filled my famished soul
as others were filled before me,
the chorus of humanity.
If my life
wasn’t as grandiose
as Hamlet, Macbeth,
there was philosophy,
economics, religion,
science,
endless repasts
on contributions
that elevated mankind.
To this day
I’m still bemused
by the prodigious output
of so many
in times of oppression,
endless wars,
greed always overcoming
our better nature,
age after age.
I have seen the signs
heralding the disappearance
of physical books,
replaced by touchscreens
in the unstructured journey
of a peculiar species
that creates beauty,
Beethoven, Monet, Whitman,
weapons of mass destruction.
I do not know
if we will survive
the march to civilization
as a tormented youth
huddles under his/her covers
without a flashlight,
reading a Kindle,
possibly the great books
that nourished me,
as long as there is power
to light the screen.
I see the faces
of tortured children
in prisons,
homeless shelters,
mental institutions,
places of punishment
for victims of poverty,
deprived
of the benefits
of civilization,
plunged
without protection
into systems of despair
that relentlessly consume
remaining prospects
of a dismal future,
consigning
rejected youth
from a harsh society
to brief lives
of confinement,
constant suffering
temporarily relieved
by acquiring the prize
of stolen sneakers.
We are the only animal
who produce plastics,
endless toxic substances
that poison the planet.
We pour, pour concrete
strangling the land
oblivious to the need
for respiration
for everything that lives.
Nature waits patiently
for our species’ demise
to regenerate the Earth,
if we don’t destroy it
before our departure.
The Elocution of Time is an unpublished poetry collection that reveals some of the stranger and more unusual occurrences that trouble our society. 'Visions', 'Subway', 'Books', 'To the Lost', 'Waiting'.