The Warning

Young Bacchus prances across red rivers of lava,

she’s cartwheeling freely and raucously wailing,

then suddenly lands on a white linen handkerchief

tattered and etched on the volcano’s black edge.

Here she commences a tender surrender to fate,

her well-earned remembrance of last century’s

old country dancers who moved in circles of love

and of family before syphilitic Nazis in murderous

uniforms, pink cheeked men stiff with malignant

psychosis, delivered these mothers and fathers, uncles,

children, sisters, aunts, grandparents and brothers

in cars meant for cattle to barbwire camps

where nobody, nobody, mattered.

Will our century’s ignorant dividers of people, these arrogant

oligarchs who fabricate only to scapegoat and conquer, explode

in our face-booked distracted faces like magma-filled volcanos

or will another automatic rifle massacre allowed- if not hallowed-

by lovers of guns and of fear of ‘the other’ need to happen before

we awaken from our trance, our overwhelmed stupor, to dance

our strong breathing bodies across this decade’s stage of hope

and resistance to stop their hell-bound freight trains from running

this time?