Home, Poem List, Previous Poem, Next Poem
We live, of course, in a golden age,
Where oppression is peer-pressure,
Poverty is a lifestyle choice
Disease is self-inflicted,
And winter is gone forever
As a golden haze fills the sky.
Our god is Stability,
Sitting cross-legged,
Smiling benignly at the long spring-clean
That clears away the last cobwebs of caring
And begins a new cycle of enterprise
Built on words and shadows and bubbles
That for an instant hide the sun
Then come to dust,
As if they had never been.
But change is there,
A monstrous figure of terror in black robes,
Arms outstretched,
Lurking in some dark corner at the edge of the mind,
Lightning bolts crackling from its fingers,
Sweeping away cherished beliefs,
Shattering treasured institutions,
Sparking strange new ideas,
Feeding an unreasoning hysteria,
To stop it, come what may.
But change does come,
From those that resist it most.
Not so much the little changes,
From those who yearn for a primitive simplicity
Where our leaders live in suburban homes
And fly cattle class (minderless),
Or from those that see them in regal splendour
At banquets of roast sycophant,
Gold leaf adorning stiff upper lip,
For these require deep consideration.
It comes instead from our great leader,
An icon since time began,
Who sees, in the final stages of his dementia,
The treeless hills, now bare of soil,
The vast salt plains,
The intensifying golden haze,
And the vicious abuse at the last dissenting cry,
As his personal gift to the nation.
Copyright © D.W. Walker, 2004