Accompanied by Tornado Siren
#37 of poetry
Experimenting with combining two poems, neither of which I though good enough to stand on their own.
I do like the sonnet/blank verse/ rhymed envoi pattern it produced. I think it deescalates and escalates similar to the way that musical theatre might use breaking into song, lapsing back into dialog, then having a big finishing number.
Let us suppose that all things human fall.
That topless tower and tin-walled hovel both
Go down, that all the laws are soothless scrawl,
That sons of man no longer care for truth.
It has to happen sometime. Why not now?
What mankind plants, mankind must someday reap.
What past affirms will future disavow.
No human work will ever ever-keep.
If so, what shall I hold to, if not thee?
What other flotsam could survive this tide?
If everything is as ending as we
Have feared, where could I end but by your side?
Let us suppose that all things human end,
Then I would choose to end with you again.
They say things fall apart, and that is true.
But so they've always done. Perhaps the gyre
Has been too narrow, in our time. Perhaps
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Because the falconer has not much voice
And now the falcon has gone wide enough
To hear, outside, above, beyond, a voice
More clear and more intoxicating. What
We thought to be the center does not hold,
And we are all afraid, but it may be
That the true center held, unmarked by us,
And it holds yet, and will hold all the while
That we are watching falcons fugitive
And fearing of the dooms that we have dreamed.
And no, it isn't fair it should be us
But what is 'not fair' worth when faced with weight
Of all our forebears unpaid greed and lust?
At least this way nobody else need pay.
Let there be nothing on my tongue but praise,
If by your side I face these final days.