2020

 

2020

 

 

So obvious doom is revving up, bringing us to our knees

more often every year, our eyes more easily caught now

by the sidewalk preacher's waving arms, beating the air

with a black leather Bible, pressing his eyes into our eyes.

 

What frankincense can calm a world's atmospheric fever,

what elixir hold resolute against its fatal virus?  Maybe

the Mayans had it right, their five-thousand-year calendar

count off by only eight years.

 

Maybe we should gather all the dirty laundry of our failures,

let go of all we've managed to build, throw ourselves

into the growing fires of these end times, believing

they will open a window to heaven.

  

 

Steven Croft

 

An Army combat veteran, Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation. His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, Ariel Chart, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, San Pedro River Review, Poets Reading the News, Gyroscope Review, The New Verse News, and other places. A Croft poem is nominated for the Pushcart Prize for Poetry, 2020.