Image: Unsplash, downloaded (https://unsplash.com/photos/zvf7cZ0PC20) 19.9.2021.
Star Stuff
Stone, brick, wood, plaster –
Save minor flood, no disaster
Will they withstand and keep
From rubble, ash, or liquefaction
Our schools and towns
Our stores and towers
Mean to last decades or forever
But fail the test over and over
Institutions, governments
Look like firmer permanence
Cumulative philosophies
The idea-building of centuries
Crushing stray concepts
With immovable math
And all-important Time
Insurance sold by the ancestor
Brought food, cars, a home
To his family –
yet bereft of assurance
Lately, the descendants
Fight the same fight, hope against hope
For crumbs and spectral chances
- - -
What we have is what we think
Though our minds are mere jellies
Molded to skulls
The brain contains
Something between naught
And all; and so fraught
With odd spastic formations
Hard to tell the real from the un-
Should it hold out another day
Thank your lucky stars
As some are wont to say
Those we believe
What we inhabit
How we depend
Illusion is the real social contract
“Castles in the sky”
Is more apt than we know
When all else fails –
Grocery stores go foodless
All of us go homeless
Lies become a currency
Governments break
Their own cherished laws,
Tho’ wealth be preserved
There will always be gravity
Keeping us as honest
As the day is long
Locked down, in our place
But should a new fission be found out
And channeled into a simple app
Humanity will have lost it
Our subatomic powder
Will anxiously rejoin the stars:
Who doesn’t deserve a fresh new start
Stay Low
Summer dies across the west
Air all smoke and no way out
An orange man harangues us:
We should have cleaned our forests
The trees are all horribly broken
Smoke and virus mix and darken
and something long-buried is reaped:
Smallpox blankets, once savagely gifted,
rooted a rich national tradition
About the Author: Casey Burchby is a writer and arts administrator living in the Sierra Nevada. His previous work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, Village Voice, Cineaste and others.
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