Poetry from Christopher Bernard

The Tower                                                  

By Christopher Bernard  

                                    

                                                A card held high above the crowd,

                                                stiff with prediction from the deck.

                                                The monumental avatar

                                                of danger, wreck, catastrophe,

                                                disaster, liberation: the tower

                                                rived by lighting, crowned with fire.

                                                A Roma girl holds it high and free:

                                                it tells of fortune: catastrophe

                                                promises possibility.

                                                Annihilated or redeemed?

                                                Destroyed? Or saved? Shout and blare

                                                rock the roads. The mob is there,

                                                motley, young, and angry crammed

                                                between the city and the sea. 

                                                The crowd surges like the tide.                                  

                                                March treads, chants shout,

                                                in a bizarrely cheerful stampede

                                                in chaotic polyphony.

                                                The beautiful young, the desperate young

                                                entombed in beauty, take the bow

                                                cutting the sea of their elders’ calm,

                                                the doldrums of death on the dead reefs;

                                                they shout at the old half in their graves

                                                as if such shouts might us all save.

                                                They march. They march. They shake their signs,

                                                their smiles are bitter, their eyes are kind.

                                                Their parents slip, contrite, ashamed,

                                                a mass at the back; good followers all,

                                                as they always were—now in parade

                                                behind their young, behind them all              

                                                (a crowd that always followed the crowd),

                                                sleepwalking toward a murderous sea

                                                that might be their posterity.

                                                And yet they march. They march. They march

                                                under the tower toward the future’s sea.

                                                Together they go, in the maze of the city,

                                                in hope and despair, in courage and woe.

                                                “Where do you come from? Where do you go?”
                                                the girl seems to ask in courage and woe.

                                                “We march under the tower of fire and woe.

                                                We march to the future inscribed in the Tarot!”

                                                And they march. And they march.

And that Roma girl

                                                casts her spell upon us all.

                                                “We march toward the future.

What will we find?”—
                                                Its smile is bitter, its eyes are kind.

                                                                                                —September 20, 2019

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Christopher Bernard’s latest collection of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will be published in 2020.

                                                                                                  —September 20, 2019

  _____   Christopher Bernard’s latest collection of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will be published in 2020.