Below, the poem
The Autumn People.
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| Cover of The Autumn People by Ray Bradbury |
It will be in a new book,
The Next World,
coming out from Shanti Arts Publishing
in January 2025.
It is a “persona” poem.
Meaning: a poem written in an assumed voice, a character.
This character experiences the world in a slightly hallucinatory
way, or maybe they see things as they really are…
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| Beirut |
And so....
The Autumn People
1.
I catch the orange glow of their cigarettes out beyond
the tracks in late Fall: all those we’ve killed in so many
of our wars, those caught in our furious crossfire, our
vicious metallic arguments with ourselves. I hear them
pad down to the river at night with zinc buckets to get
water for coffee, to keep them awake, vigilant. They
may be dead but they are still wary of us. Each footfall
is soft as the shift of a fin below the river’s surface.
2.
They have been gathering their forces, waiting patiently
until they have enough mass to rush the city, shut down
the grid, the water, stop traffic, grind the tired economy
to a halt, eliminate sleep. (Maybe it’s already happened:
Insomnia has built a strong following here.) Sometimes
they steal into the city in twos and threes, rummage
recycling bins, clink glass jars together to find the perfect
sound that will bring all the walls and bridges down.
3.
They have a saying they pass on to the newly dead in their
camps. I hear it lying awake at night: everything is happening
at once. I can feel it’s truth. Everything is happening at once.
There are moments when I believe they have already stormed
the city, that it’s already over. Last night on my rounds I passed
a body sleeping (or dead) beneath a thin blanket. The wind
lifted the frayed corner. I saw a hand, relaxed. Me, I welcome
the invasion, a revelation of secrets the dead will reveal.
4.
This morning, impatient, I went out to them, crossed the tracks,
waded through high grass, into the line of trees beside the river,
to tell them that it’s time, everything’s cracking and breaking
apart of its own accord, and it may only take a breath, a whisper,
a nudge, to shut everything down, start anew. On a mud bank,
I found two men, talking over each other, full of rapid-fire
meth-inspired words, focused on how to fix a bike so they
could sell it, the fantastic things they would do with the cash…
(The Autumn People was previously published in Cholla Needles)
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I wrote The Autumn People in the fall of 2022,
addressing the horror and shame arising
from decades of looking into the abyss created
by of one of the main US exports to the world:
violence via weapons manufacturing.
More about US Weapons and Consequences (Death Tolls) in a
previous blog, found here.
Sanders' Joint Resolution of Disapproval (Blocking Arms Sales to Israel)
Israel-Gaza War in Maps and Charts - Civilian Casualties included (Aljazeera)
