Meditations in Fast Times: 15. Save us! For the waters are rising

                15.

The broadcast news announces:
triumphal cars deployed to the border,
all sabers rattling and threat of sanctions;
echoes of former days,
of charging up an army or two
while the rest of the world wonders
—and all for a spit of land by the seaside.

Save us! For the waters are rising;
we are sinking in the muddy deep,
and under our feet,
there is no firm ground.

Must what was stolen,
time and again, once more
be returned to the hands of thieves,
these soft spoken cult heroes,
offering promises on deceits?

While winds howl
on the raging seas,
one solution is man overboard,
while another will call for peace:
Shut it! one said,
and there was quiet,
while the other fellow got
shut in the belly of the fish;
in the end,
each was a kind of salvation,
though one was more difficult to clean up.

What, then, of this latest
crime over Crimea?

One martyr said,
where the heart longs,
the will cannot fail to choose;
reason, in the end, must justify.

© 2013 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen