Ambient Political Precarity
When nothing goes wrong, yet nothing seems right:
It wasn’t so long ago; think of the sight:
George Floyd’s rotten riots, the Capitol Breach,
A disease’s gestalt and our long, fearful screech.
“The other side started it” (dwarfish excuse,
eating our flesh, like a damn brown recluse).
“I’m going to end it,” my father would say;
Whether I, or my sister, had started the fray.
On the Rancor Against Peter
and Jennifer Hegseth
Stupefied, we view this day,
When wives would qualify as prey
Of insults, shamelessly deployed,
By foolish talk, that’s much destroyed
The quiet peace that formerly,
From sea to sea, once normally,
Gave us years so gladsome, kind,
And memories that soothe the mind.
O help us fight this night, Good Lord:
“Make war on rancor; gird thy sword,
Defend those wives who make a home,
For guys who fight encroaching gloam.”
Alec Ream is a writer living in Virginia. His poetic work and creative fiction have been widely published. A member of the Demosthenian Literary Society at UGA, he wrote on Lookout Mountain, and continued to write, lecture and work for Delta Kappa Epsilon HQ. He was first published reading to the pledge class of Michigan DKE, in Ann Arbor in 2008. Recently, his poem Green Fire was read at the Washington Literary Society & Debating Union at UVA.
