Our Fair Sentence
Those days were still wearing their brand-new welcomes,
putting one word—world—in front of another, blazonry
and all good faith therein where was writ dexter, sinister,
pick a number. Any everyman was proud to proclaim
the state of even our disaster’s faster, trophies soldered
fist to plinth to tower over in precipitous dazzle down
to the waterlogged potter’s field in which listed fits pitched
for the night, the beaten band and the broken bank, the seep
where the earth wept up its ichor, war cry whittled to dumb
ditty—shoot first, shoot later—dialectic left for dead and
the closest exit indeed behind us by way of frayed refrain:
say when, say when.
