Charles Harmon

All Fall Down

Even pockets full of posies will not protect you

from the plague, evil spirits are in the air,c

oughed and sneezed, your ashes will all fall down

just as forests now burning burn homes and habitats

of humans and woodland creatures alike, destroy life

because of our hubris building in the land of smokes

that the indigenous were wise to avoid or occupy.

 

But their land was stolen and occupied nevertheless,

Manhattan Island was traded for handfuls of glass beads

and a fortified wall built across to keep out the heathen

while drilling into granite bedrock made great foundations

for towers of steel and glass reaching high toward heaven.

Years later two of the tallest were destroyed by fanatics

using as weapons the creative produce of the new world—

airplanes, computers, internet, telephones, refined jet fuel—

launching wars on terrorism that bled the West for 20 years

and trillions of dollars and millions of lives, the towers fell,

metal melting from the intense heat and some choose to jump,

falling a thousand feet to their deaths rather than be burned alive,

from the fall of man to the falling man, all fall down.

 

Now the almighty dollar is falling, we are printing without end

trying to pay for all this, no one looks back into history, remembers

this ends in disaster, catastrophic inflation and economic collapse

such as ended many prior civilizations and their empires.

Those who refuse to learn from the past will repeat those mistakes,

the fall of Saigon is followed by the fall of Afghanistan then…

Taiwan? Korea? The good old USA? The rest of the world? 

Yet surely as the burning hotter-than-hell Summer is followed

by Autumn with its colorful falling leaves and cold Winter,

melting snow and falling Spring rains will make the world reborn.

All it takes is a little water, light, soil, weeding, and care.

We all fall down sometimes, so get off our butts and get going again.