Getting closer to 2000 Easters

 

                 The wind Bloweth where it listeth,
                 and thou hearest the sound thereof,
                 but canst not tell whence it cometh,
                 or whither it goeth: so is every one
                 born of the spirit.

 

                          - Gospel According to St. John, 3:8

 

Now we know precisely from whence the wind comes,
and can predict more or less accurately where it's going.
Everybody who wants to can see this charted on television.
One means of measuring its progress is doppler shifts,
the same technology that shows us the speed of stars
and lets us know that all of them are moving away.
Some see this as a process of expansion and growth;
others as a form of decay, a metaphor for
human and divine alienation and impossibility.
From this we know that, despite our poetic assumptions,
the wind has no freedom, is just a slave of physics,
and can only go where equally enslaved patterns
of temperature and pressure drag it.

 

Power, as usual, amuses itself with war and destruction.
Patterns of despair and energy drag those who think
they have power around as helplessly as the wind.
Throughout the world rage grows with renewals
of poverty, epidemics, and the diseases of ideology.

 

For the last month, my father has refused to die,
despite almost total collapse of all internal systems.
This means that I have to constantly postpone
my own surgery. My father's refusal may suggest a kind
of resurrection, as my ability in postponements
could suggest that I am free enough to do so without risk.
Some corners of the world allow balances like this.

 

Here in the rust belt, where the wind has rampaged
for countless millennia, beginning before the first humanids
stood upright, the wind roars ferociously today,
shaking the car as I drive, as though it wanted
to shove it off the road or into another car.
Yet I have always loved the winds of this place.

 

Getting out of the car in front of the nursing home,
it yanks at the sleeves of my coat and throws my hair
around as though it were a father tosseling
his son's locks.

 

 

© Karl Young

http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/young/young.htm