Making America Great Again

Once again the pollsters,
those diviners of auspices and entrails,
have been proven wrong,
and a wave of Nativist disenchantment
with the Beltway, the urbane elites,
the icons of Wall Street
rolls from the Deep South to the Rust Belt
and across the Plains,
upsetting the political applecart
and giving a new Magus carte blanche
to tear up trade deals
that hollow out factories and towns,
to keep foreign riffraff
from infiltrating liberty’s domain,
to turn the clock back to a time
when the Constitution in all its Second Amendment splendor
held full rein.
Where all this will end
only historians of the future will know,
but for the moment irresistible forces bubble up
from the subterranean layers
and ressentiment becomes the flavour of our era.

Europa after the rain

In its own inimitable way,
Europe undoes the stitches that bind its wounds,
north against south,
the frugal ones against the party-goers,
mistrust the flavour of the month,
disenchantment seeping through the corridors
where emissaries meet for negotiations without end,
Penelope’s thread unable to withstand
the constant fraying, the weatherbeaten elements,
for the continent has too many mountain ranges, verdant islands,
rivers pursing through its veins
to be a single integrated space,
and already the ghosts of Holy Roman Empires past,
Napoleonic conceits, and Congresses to spell an end to war
remind the chastened eavesdropper at the door
that dreams and nightmares are really twins
and fir trees and olive groves
splintered witnesses to all that came before.