Reentry

Each bloody dawn
I weep dry tears upon the daily news
Where fears and miseries propagate like yeast.

But this arid grief won’t nourish any harvest
And spring may never come:
Just dead weeds in broken snow.

Once, dreamers walked these plains
And visionaries lifted hearts and hopes—
But where are they now?
Muted in the cacophony of rabid merchants howling,
Or huddling, like me, in the comforting arms of despair.

Still, kindnesses and flickering ideals skitter in the undergrowth
Like primeval mammals darting among dinosaurs’ crushing tread.
As long as they survive, you can fantasize that, in time,
They might yet thrive—
Evolve—
Even rise to dominate.

But first, of course, the asteroid.

I wonder: where are we now,
In the arc of the comet’s plunge?

In the dizzying descent, some will seek and even find solace
In the cloyingest clichés: silver linings, deep nights and daybreaks, rock bottoms and resurrections—
Dreams of a better someday world.

But no promise comes payment-free,
No benefit absent cost—
No transcendence without travail.

This golden morrow we aspire to—
What might it look like?
Kinder than our today, or just less cruel?
A technotopia or a pastoral paradise?
Though neither, in truth, would be free of fleas or glitches.

In any case, we likely can’t get there from here.
At least, not before gravity completes its rendezvous with fate. 

After, then. Always an after. 

So the last best hope might be that in the purifying fire of the asteroid’s reentry
We can slough the shell of our viler selves
And emerge cleaner from the ashes:
Some small wisdoms steadfastly retained,
Some stubborn flaws finally shed and gone.

Then, in the freedom of rebirth,
In the repudiation of our myriad darknesses,
What bright-plumed phoenix might take wing
Into what radiant resurgent dawn?

Lawrence Blair Goral
20 February 2025
Bayfield, Colorado