Woolgathering

by Christina Hambleton

A figure from the lost generation, but decades too late,

  winds up the street in tendered, forceful apathy.

  It is hard to tell, whether this hollowed ghost walking

  on hallowed ground is laughing or crying—

  either way, it's been drowned by the screeching of the bellows

  and the muting veils of cinders and ash.

  Yet watch how our figure's eyes narrow lovingly at the flakes

  of backbreaking sable snow, of embers shoveled,

  of a father's sweating back, thin and scarred,

  rippling in grotesque time to the spitting of those chimneys— blackest chimneys!

  Only the industrialist knows of prayer, of feeding the swine on the hill

  in barest hopes they'll nuzzle a truffle or two down, that your

  children can sit and imbibe the sweet Elysium, suckle on the milk

  of Wisdom the squirming piglets know instead of breaking their stems

  forcing their blossoms through the tarmac.

  Our figure tears at this, its careening riance echoing through the city.

  Oh dearest cynic, knowing not the irony of temperance and

  drunken thoughts— a bacchanal of hopeless ennui!

  You learned battle from a soldier who didn't want to teach,

  but knew that war comes to us all, and that anyway

  you love guns and daggers and sin without ever putting any to use

  because they're this absolute where all bleed equal.

  Except maybe— maybe it’s true that people in the tenements—

  they bleed just a little— just a smidgen!—

  darker.

  A Story