Poem for Sunday, August 4, 2013

A Hundred Years

Piano Rags by Scott Joplin
has been spinning all
day.


The whooshes and clanks
of thirty-boxcar trains
promptly follow;


black-ink night has seeped
into the sky. Tonight my
dreams


will drag me back a hundred
years by eyelids clenched
shut;


there will still be a war. If I
fight, my letters to you
will be


bloodstained and eloquent.
A thousand miles
away,


you will dance gracefully
as tattered flags kiss
the dirt.