Poem: Liberation Day

LIBERATION DAY By Brian Seiler

Three in the morning we are hidden trackside in the scrabble
We have friends everywhere
all of us soaked in a shield wall of rain slickers  
    cascading over pods of muck boots
We have sent for help from all quarters and
    here swim emissaries from the awakening oceans

Word has traveled that she will pass this way
There's the signal—a loon call echoing down the line of crossings

Now we are great Birnam Wood slowly moving 
    from the waterfalling cinder brush
Sodden creatures posing as feet urge us forward
We have left behind coffee and all comforts
for after all this is a rescue mission

Handheld lanterns hover over the tracks—
a galaxy of miniature suns burning away
any delusions of gunpowder plots
Simply
    this westbound train will not reach its destination
No violence no need to hail or derail the train—
it just aches and bangs to a halt as the crew fades
from history 
Then all are still but
unsettled in the hoppers
    the scrap piles complain with the silent screams of Gothic arches
and the engine has seized up, gears corrupted

Before us a line of cars like spent shotgun shells
    but for a luminous prisoner transport
Cargo doors now askew have groaned off hinges
and no longer stand as guards but kneel
as attendants in the gravel
The rain halts abruptly and even the moon now eavesdrops
on our struggle to banish the monsters back to shadow

Eyes blue-emblazoned, a tall figure
    with hair tucked up in a white-starred Phrygian cap
    leaps down as one emerging from the pages of horror
The captive has flag-mantled forearms and 
    wrists with fresh wounds layered over the ones older than trees
Harbor-gray robes glide into the throng as she pauses
What took you so long to muster, friends?
The lamps are going out all over America

No one for miles says a word
    as her eyes indulge the memory of old growth forest

We could linger long in the near dawn
and entangle our roots
while she speaks to the trees and the trees speak to time in its native tongue

For just a moment she is somewhere else
    somewhere else tearing light from black holes with her bare hands

The lamps...we shall see them lit again
But we have work to do. All of us.
    and with a ballroom-burning determination 
    she is Potomac-bound

The loon calls again as the sun breaks on liberation day
The fearsome reckoning has begun

 

 

Note: America is a country that, on paper, at least, grants freedom of speech, but that right seems to be in jeopardy. It is alarming and pathetic that I have to include this note, but because of NSPM-7, I am hereby stating that this poem does not support violence (this fact is literally stated IN the poem). Liberation Day uses figurative language - personification, simile, metaphor, etc. in the long tradition of American writers -  to evoke spontaneous American unity and nonviolent legal justice being meted out to the many who have manipulated and warped our government.

The poet's vision of American Values is as such: We come together as a nation in community to build things both concrete and abstract that elevate us. The institutions we build comprise "wholes" that surpass the sum of the parts, and are used for purposes of protection and invention but never as weapons against any of the "parts."