The Warning

Young Bacchus prances across red rivers of lava, she’s cartwheeling wildly, 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 tornadoes of steam; she’s pelted by an ominous,

hissing toxic rain.

These old country dancers who flowed like blue rivers in circles of love and of family until murderous fascists, sallow cheeked men stiff and passive, thin men eaten inside from slow growing cancers

of blame, fueled by fiery spores of hate for the stranger, callously 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, now eighty years’ older, stands as witness arm in arm with stern Chronos and the oracle

Pythia, throws down the wineskin, torn and stained gray from apathy, terror, the desecration

of vineyards, fields of lavender and vetch ripped open, blackened by bombs, by the wretchedness

of humans. She’s draped in history’s shadow across an ocean where she soberly watches, listening

for omens; yes, even hoping people of today will heed those screams, that anguished warning

erupting long ago, and will gaze into time’s mirror of present and past, wholeheartedly consider

how to plunge into life’s blue river in this century:

will we permit those ignorant dividers of people, arrogant oligarchs who fabricate and scapegoat,

worship concrete walls, whose hubris poisons earth and sky, to explode in our face-booked distracted faces like magma-infested mountains 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, this overwhelmed stupor, to step from our encapsulated homes, dance and march,

take a knee across the decade’s fields of sport and stage to transcend futility’s drug, resist with

our sisters and brothers, re-possess power, migrate to our true fertility, and lay down

on the tracks to block their hell-bound trains of dark iron and grief from running this time?

Bacchus ponders, nods to Pythia and 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

as we turn and walk away from the massive volcano’s lip. The air clears in the verdant valley

below where we now are free to be with those who sang and danced, laughed and loved

in ghetto, on farm, joining them in dissolving madness, as they teach us to flow, to fight,

to redeem ourselves in great reverberating circles of peace and safety, of reverent quiet,

boisterous joy, of simple human goodness.