The Poor

Who are the poor? It depends
who is defining the abstruse lot
that continually grows
no end, all children
of an absentee god.

what comes next

What comes next is not unknown. It is 
as clear as a clear sky day, sky like glass
blue like you can see through it and what lies
beyond, those blue green fields of cornflowers
a tree, a rainbow, an eternal outdoor
picnic like we dreamed to do on Sundays.
What Sunday-school picture books all say.

What comes next is not unknown. All told
from the pulpit, how the world will become
dust, like flesh into ash, the questions.
Only the living left bereft.

My papers are sent. The board to convene.
Meanwhile. 
I pretend not to pay attention 
to the arthritic bloom in my finger joints.

When I was younger and younger, 
palm to palm my fingers could mimic
the grace of a swimming fish's tail.
I could move one or both ears...

Such feat for a twelve year old!

What comes next is not unknown. 
I tell my dog we will see the vet on Sunday.
Meanwhile I recover from my own bout
with flu. The days are numbered.
What comes next is not unknown.

Only the heart is scared. Brave only by
closing its eyes. To leap into the known.

atlas shrugged

"The man who said he would stop the motor of the world and did."  The line I remember of Ayn Rand's book.  Made me pick it up and wade through the yellowed and water-stained volume.

Somehow:  it made sense why an assembly-line worker for cars cannot have a car; why the Man with the Idea can have it all.  

Because the Idea ripples, and blooms.  The Idea is the seed, from which grows the tree, from where many can reap.  So that is why capitalism appears to be utopia.

But we are on capitalism now.  And on the fringes, there, the impoverished; in the hidden fringes, there, the sweat shops.

Where is John Galt now?