Slouching Toward Bethlehem Martine Bigos

Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Pennsylvania Martine Bigos

*(A Revision of "Talk")

i. The Gytrash Roaming down a lane in early morn, An unknown figure comes into our sight. Just as our suspicions start to form, Its eager tendons canter toward the light. Vile as a child free from hate, With soul and gleaming fur, we grasp relief. Instinct ought to hold a greater weight Because its gentle nature was but brief. Little can offset its fervid aim.

Its claws are hollowed in the softened ground. Promises have set us all aflame

With impulse to enlist, or flee the hounds. Jane is nothing less that unarmed when The varmint’s disguised as one’s closest friend.

ii. Macduff The two dozen hours remain at hand

For voice and ear to merge as she rests still, And chance fails to defuse or lose command

Till Birnam Wood reaches Dunsinane Hill.

But corps of knave can shift the talks of fate, So ill and wretched since the age of Cain. Although the deck was dealt upon our plate, There’s few with pride for sense to rid disdain. Our lips may touch the sounds we claim to seek As potent limbs stalk through thickets of chaff. Diluted truth trips down the forest’s creek, Its sweetness aids the weary as a staff. And so favor will tip the scale enough As their stiff woodlands come to mount the bluff.

iii. Yeats the Augur Here we squat, inside the valley dam, To watch her belly sprout beside the beast. Imbrued with newfound truth churned by the clan, Its lurid pact arrives each day to feast. Although circumstance has now ceas’d to stun, The banshee’s keening within fails to halt, For all that’s pure has drowned, barren and dun. Corporate descent has left us all at fault. Run! O’ run past buildings long collapsed, And sages chained adjacent to the trail. Now we know the vigor of an axe. Dear reticence, the grave you will inhale. The Final Coming’s flora and fauna

Are slouching toward Bethlehem, ’sylvania?

iv. Versailles, an Awakening Some can recall yesterday’s defects. When the victorious starv’d conquered land, Awareness of execrable effects

And horrors unassumed are seldom planned. We ought to question a recurrence, When silent hordes are smothered by the few Whose potent views have tainted their presence. So little they’ll accept, and much they’ll do. But where does that leave the doves now encaged? If one has the means, eastward land is safe. Unguided by perspective’s mild assuage, The poles are defined, right and left in place. Pushing the destitute to the brink, Let us drown, the air will fill with pink.