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.

Cradling an empty wineskin, she commences a tender surrender to what some have named fate

while people hover above the seething caldera like spirits marooned, they shout their pain,

admonish Bacchus in strange tongues above the hissing steam. Old country dancers who once flowed

like blue rivers in circles of love and of family until murderous fascists, pink cheeked men stiff

with passivity, thin men eaten inside from slow growing cancers of malignant blame, fiery spores

of hate for strangers, 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, eighty years’ older, now arm in arm with stern Chronos, has thrown down the wineskin, torn and stained by apathy, by terror, stands still in history’s shadow across an ocean where she’s soberly watching, listening for omens; yes, even hoping, people of today will heed those screams 

of warning from long ago, gaze long into a true mirror to see past and present, and consider:

will we permit our century’s ignorant dividers of people, these arrogant oligarchs who fabricate, scapegoat and worship walls, to explode in our face-booked distracted faces like magma-filled volcanoes or will one more massacre be allowed - if not hallowed- by lovers of the almighty gun, 

by fear of ‘the other’, to smear our screens and front pages before we awaken from trance, 

our overwhelmed stupor, to step from our encapsulated homes and dance and march, take a knee across this decade’s fields of sport and stage to resist with our sisters and brothers, re-possess power, migrate to our best selves, our real fertility, and lay down on the tracks to block their hell-bound

freight trains of warped iron and blood from running this time?

Bacchus wonders, nods to Chronos as she looks deeply into our futures through eyes that shine

but cannot see how gods might matter. Her eyes close, she prays we do no harm and commune

with those who sang and danced, laughed and loved in ghetto, on farm, joining them in dissolving

madness, as they teach us to flow in great reverberating circles of peace and gladness.