Ken Craft

Rip

Ken Craft

Upon seeing Confederate flags outside some Maine households. Maybe it was wrong, wishing I were Rip Van Winkle so I could sleep four orange years away, wake, and shout, “This, too, has passed!” to the ticker tape masses. But the folk tale fantasy of it all was dismissed by a friend labeling my silence “moral cowardice.” He counseled waking and woke,

running past the Sleepy Hollow barbershop’s pole of blue, blood, and white; getting the cynicism trimmed from my eyebrows, having the indifference brushed from my beard. Might it be too late by then, I asked, swiping sand motes from my eyes, Q-Tipping lost opportunities from my ears?

Might I hear barking men, see boorish salutes, witness crisp Stars and Bars flapping on flag poles along either side of Main Street in this Free State of Maine, which buried over 7,000 Union dead? “Yes,” he replied. “And return to another country entirely. One no amount of sleep could salvage.”

Ken Craft ‘s poems have appeared in The Writer's Almanac, Verse Daily, One, South Florida Poetry Journal, Pedestal Magazine, and numerous other journals and e-zines. He lives in Maine and is the author of two collections of poetry, Lost Sherpa of Happiness (Kelsay Books) and The Indifferent World (FutureCycle Press). His third collection, Reincarnation & Other Stimulants, will appear in 2021.