
I fear we are singing to ourselves,
Chanting love songs
Across a candle-lit and empty time
Between the backs of our minds.
We found long ago that our parents
Were as dead as their ancestors,
That their minds barely fuzz
Through the centuried routines
Of their existence.
Quizzically, victoriously,
We lost them.
We lost half our families.
We found then
That our friends grew up
Into the yeses and the noes,
The loves and the hates.
And in the intensity we had to divide
The us from the them.
Decidedly, though tearfully,
We washed them away.
We lost half our friends.
We found that the people
On buses and radios,
The little old people
And the blank young men,
Said terrible things about our heroes
And terrible things about our hopes.
Positively, thoroughly,
We cut them off.
We lost half the country.
Look around then.
See who reads your poems:
Dead letter critics,
Other hopeful poets.
And we come to see
That the only hope
is the one song
that we can come together
and sing in so loud a voice
all together
come together
and sing it now,
sing
Truth.
Now.
Truth.
And maybe the echoes
Of the force
Of all the joy
We have ever felt
In being close together
In singing one song
Will make the walls and the buildings
and the illusions
All
Fall
Down.
Otherwise,
We will go on humming,
Rocking,
Cradled in our arms
Until one day the song will freeze,
Bright ribbon in the air,
And crack
Into a million sharp silences.
Silences.
I am Milly Brown of Reno, Nevada. I studied under Josephine Miles at U. C. Berkeley. Many of my poems have been printed in various publications over the years, most notably - U-Rights Magazine (2020); Straylight Online (2020); Bangalore Review (2019); California Quarterly (2019); Desert Wood (UNR, 1991); Eclectic (1970); Hiram Poetry Review (1971); The Green Flag (City Lights Books, 1969). I took a long break from submitting, but I am revived.
