Pinocchio: [noticing the raft] A raft? That's it! We'll take the raft. And when the whale opens his mouth...

A tawdry and a dreary time
a dictator's dead and there is no snow
but rogue storms through the Rockies
winter in limbo.
A phony season pretending spring,
lovely, yet a peculiar thing
lulls the hot heads from its hint of threat
off-focus of the battle zone.
On the flanks, toboggans in the basement,
cooler heads worry so.
December drizzle and a war without end
with the daily drip, drip, drip of the dead
to the three-thousandth repeat round number
and the New Year still in old throes;
the breaking Arctic ice shelf alarming the caring
of the drowning polar bears;
"we're winning!" what global warming?" let's pretend.
Yet the real is not the reality show;
the denoument, not the drop of puppeteer prop--
a sham of a martyrdom--
and the moral tale Pinocchio's*.
What's to fear you prefer? Nature's wrath? Nuclear holocaust?
Where's the Hero we hunger for, or the hope?
Who can save us the Future from the looming harms?

© Helga Ross 2007


* Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi (1881-1883)