Poetry |

“After 11/6/16 and Oklahoma Drilling”

After 11/6/16 and Oklahoma Drilling

 

Most survived the unexpected day of wind

and some mornings even felt half alive,

although the air was full of wasted words,

and the internet was mostly flushed crimson

 

with defeat. Rivers continued to flood,

and traffic ran on as if climate change

was just another lie the minority

would not admit to be a greater good.

 

But those of us who died, however right

or wrong, poured our fears into coffee mugs

and wrote our poems and told our little lives,

which were exploding daily into flight.

 

It was as if the precession was off

a fracking notch or two and something dark

quaked around the spent world.  Of politics

we had had quite enough, though aftermath

 

would mean full stop and painful mopping up

of rhetoric that spewed over the shaken

platform’s splintered planks when the circus clowns

collapsed in glee behind the two-faced dope.

 

Slogans we had written turned out a noose:

hanging onto such loose lines wore us down.

Our lives would never run on track again:

the whole show was wrecked by its red caboose.

Contributor
Jim Barnes

Jim Barnes has published nine poetry collections, most recently Visiting Picasso (University of Illinois Press). Sundown Explains Nothing: New and Selected Poems (Stephen F. Austin University Press) is forthcoming. He divides his time between Hacienda McKown (Santa Fe, NM) and the Flying M Ranch (Atoka, OK).

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