The Warning

Young Bacchus prances across red rivers of lava, she’s cartwheeling freely

and raucously wailing, suddenly lands on a white linen handkerchief

tattered and etched on the volcano’s black edge. Here she commences

a tender surrender to what some have named fate, her well-earned remembrance

of last century’s old country dancers who moved in circles of love and of family

until fascists in murderous uniforms, pink cheeked men stiff with passivity,

eaten inside from slow growing cancer of malignant psychosis, delivered these mothers

and fathers, uncles, children, sisters, aunts, grandparents and brothers in cars of iron

and blood meant for cattle to barbwire camps where nobody, nobody, mattered.

Bacchus is eighty years’ older today, she stands still in the shadows of history

where she’s soberly watching, listening for omens and yes, even hoping:

will we allow our century’s ignorant dividers of people, these arrogant oligarchs

who fabricate to scapegoat and conquer, explode in our face-booked distracted faces

like magma-filled volcanos or will one more massacre allowed - if not hallowed-

by lovers of guns, by fear of ‘the other’, need to smear our screens and front pages

before we awaken from trance, our overwhelmed stupor, to leave our homes of aloneness

to dance and march with sisters and brothers, our strong breathing bodies stretch across

this decade’s stages of resistance as we re-possess our power, lay down on the tracks

to block their hell-bound freight trains of warped iron and blood from running this time?

Bacchus is nodding, seeing our future, uncertain of the gods yet she’s quietly praying.