The Dark, Long Night

Note: This poem is my first political poem after over 50 years of poetry-writing about personal and psychological processes. It is an attempt to face and address our current political polarization through an act of radical empathy. The opening image of the poem came to me in a dream, which then seeded the rest of the poem, with the two sides portrayed like opposing choruses in an ancient Greek play or in two dialoguing aspects of a person in a piece of psychotherapeutic two-chair work.

  

1. Blow it Up!

In my dream we are milling around

In the torch-lit night,

Full of crowds of people chanting his name,

Playing dice with dictatorship.

 

Democracy is a distant abstraction

Dying a death of despair,

Heedless, unhearing,

Its promises bankrupted by greed

Broken by promises not kept

By wrongs, ancient and modern,

Allowed to fester,

Shot up with the heroin of false hopes.

 

But the people in this party are celebrating,

A carnival atmosphere,

Exciting, full of lights and illusions.

And the people cry out,

In furious jubilation:

 

We have this feeling that

We used to be the center

Of the universe.

But we’ve lost so much;

It hurts so much.

If this is how things are going to be, then:

Blow it up!

 

We’re sick all those fancy people

Looking down on us,

They think they know better than us;

But they know nothing.

Blow it up!

 

He gets us, when no one else does.

He cares about us, when no one does.

He makes us feel good, when no one else does,

And everything else in our life feels like crap.

Blow it up!

 

When everyone hates him

And thinks he’s a dangerous fool,

An autocrat or a narcissist,

We know how he feels.

We are his, and he is ours:

When everyone else looks down on us for loving him,

Blow it up!

 

All I know is: Every year

Is worse than the last.

We’ll never get out of this ever-deepening pit,

And our children: It will be worse for them.

Blow it up!

 

At least he will do something, anything;

He’s going to break things that need to be broken.

So we can rejoice in the chaos and carnage,

Because we have no illusions:

What could be worse than how things have been?

Blow it up!

 

Our only hope of getting

Where we need to be

Is going to be

To keep our faith in him

And to fight his enemies, who are our enemies,

To force the new dawn of OUR new day.

But to get there: First, we must:

Blow it up!

 

 

2. Let’s Raise Each Other Up!

 

This is bad enough,

But I can’t seem to wake up

From this bad dream.

And I have a feeling that

It is going to be

A dark, long night.

 

Yet there is one thing I do know:

I need to look around me,

For friends, for company

To get me through the dark, long night.

And there they are,

In a chorus of still, small voices,

Singing this:

 

We have no illusions:

We know this night is just beginning

And will be dark and long. So:

Let’s raise each other up!

 

For so long, we’ve lived in the margins

We didn’t have much,

But we did have hope

That things were finally

Turning for the better,

When everyone could say,

Let’s raise each other up!

 

So we look out and see

All these other lonely, different,

Marginalized people, looking back at us,

Hoping for a friend.

Lost and confused,

We don’t know everything,

But at least we know this:

Let’s raise each other up!

 

They get me, and I get them.

They want to know about me

And I want to know about them;

We can care about each other

And help each other feel good

When things feel like crap. So:

Let’s raise each other up!

 

When the people who are

Going to run things now

Despise us for being woke, or gay, or trans,

Or different, or foreign or undocumented,

And for loving each other,

Wise, each in our own ways,

Let’s raise each other up!

 

It’s scary and painful,

With every year likely

To be worse than the last

In this ever-deepening pit. So:

Let’s raise each other up!

 

And the other-Others,

Our siblings in pain:

Even those who sing his praises

And hope for their special dawn,

It will be worse for them, also. So:

Let’s raise them up, too!

 

If we join together,

And don’t give in to despair or hate,

And don’t other, each other,

At least we can do something

To raise each other up!

 

Our only hope of getting through this,

Is going to be holding on

To our faith in each other

Through this dark, long night,

Believing in the possibility of dawn,

Where things can be better for all of us,

Than they are now,

If only we don’t forget:

Let’s raise each other up!

 

                                                            (version: November 2024, Pleasanton)