A poem for Our Time

Oh, America

by Michael Belch

(Video version here

How shall we comfort ourselves?

- Nietzsche

Evening skews

across frozen grass

like a dying thing clawing trunks

in the deep forest.

I fear that we are like this,

America, fading

wrongly into night.

The withered leaves of our hands

flutter finally down

on skiffs of scattered breeze,

roots tap for water

in scrapes of dry bedrock,

our wells are dark pits

of fern bones.

Let’s call down the shaft

again as we drop the pail,

maybe something is listening

this time.

Where will we go,

when we are thirsty?

What will our children say,

that we were too strong of will

to doubt ourselves?

We have dragged

buckets through dusty cisterns

and passed them to hospitals,

bars, and swimming pools,

as though we had always bathed

in dirt, as though

thirst never compelled

like a beak shatters a shell

or wings catch a hawk

at the bottom of its plunge.