Now that morning has come, my heart,
alone in the after will feel its sorrow for a world lost.
Birds will sing to me as I walk through the meadow.

When you look out upon the world and see,
will you this time too, as before, survey
such devastation and wonder if perhaps

there might have been the slightest value
in what you so easily discarded, plucking
the thought as ordinary random option

as if it or I were just another card
to play and you some petty dealer
shuffling through, from time to time

as you liked to, while standing on the deck
as if the shipwreck had been a fluke
as if the world was not burning
as if your separation of yourself

was merely distant footnote,
inconsequential?


Then, when I would see it, it would astound
and confound me—how so vast a suffering
in others could mean so little to you.

As before, so now the door has closed
and the die has been cast and you seem,
here at the end, the last possible moment

now past, oblivious to the cost. Not to me,
though that too you grossly underestimate.
I speak of what was entrusted to us.

I cannot conceive what it is you believe.
All that was required for a different trajectory
for all was so little and yet you denied even that

as you like to play the part of prisoner
as if the keys were never given
as if you did not hear the angel's singing
as if your ties to all the defiant 

was beyond you, trapping you 
in adversity.


As before, so now you have not lived
according to your own words. I do not
remember those particular ones

as mine. When we wrote together then
those were the finest to me and I find
them most true today, in our age.

Here, at the last, as it was in the beginning
for freedom we are set free. Here, too,
faith has not been nurtured and hope

was tossed aside, love forfeited
and all the reasons why cited endlessly
to excuse your absence, even 

as you like to seem not to see
as if all your circling mattered not
as if obscure obligation was your lot
as if all the birds you shot

and your own song sealed in time,
dismissal of dark night before

mattered not.
So what?


The skylark sings

but I do not know that you will hear it
from within the casket of dying things
to which you have chained yourself. 

The raven brings

its season of change and the echo
of lost opportunity for the unity
divided by opportunist pursuit.


As before...
so now?