These Days
By Bert Meyers
Homage to Attila József
These days, everything’s bad.
The future waits in a button.
No one plans, nobody says:
Three years from now ...
Evening falls upon a porch;
bloody, black and white,
it opens like the paper.
Someone bursts into flames.
Winter, a grim warehouse,
delivers the wind.
An angry truck rattles by—
the inconsolable self,
strumming its gas pedal,
tuning up for the storm.
Lies! so many lies!
Windows malignant with things.
When at last the nail
strangles the hammer
and even the ant howls.
Then rifles, rockets—
“O what a time, what a time!”
And, like an old ideal,
the moon’s been reached.
A few astonished flies
wrinkle the dust on its face.
Be like the rain
that wears a ragged coat
and finds a lamp
in the smallest stone
and sings for nothing
from street to street.
Notes:
“These Days” was originally published in The Wild Olive Tree (West Coast Poetry Review, 1979) and is reprinted with permission of Daniel Meyers. For more information about Bert Meyers, please visit bertmeyers.com
This poem is part of the portfolio “Bert Meyers: A Gardener in Paradise.” Read the rest of the portfolio in the January 2023 issue of Poetry.
Source: Poetry (January 2023)