Dover Droning

(with appreciation for poet Matthew Arnold, Britain, 1847) Our nation is stormy just now. The reds are bullies; the blues seek fairness, to straighten the crooked maga crimps. In the Persian gulf the drones fly off and on; trump's war drones on and on, glimmering and fast, in what used to be a tranquil gulf. We grok the web; fraught are these times. But from the droning cloud where the news meets our troubled minds, Listen! you hear the grating roar of old wars which the memories wave up, and fling, at their return,

up the silicon strand, beginning, ceasing, and beginning again, with perilous violence mad, to bring the magamania madness in. Solomon long ago spotted it in Zion, and it brought into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human vanity; we find also in the buzz, a meme, now, a ruminating on the distant fuse, Hormuz. But our Sea of Faith was, back in the day, spread full around the world like the mantle of an empty shroud on the Resurrection morn. But now the strand brings melancholy news, slung in silicony roar, repeating in the airwaves of the night-wind, down the vast edges and naked circuits of the world. Ah, citizens, let us be true to our ancient roots; for the world, which seems to spin around us as some whirlwind of our dreams, so various,

sometimes beautiful, sometimes new, has neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help now pain - or so it sometimes seems.  We hear droning rain as a belching train, swept with predirected blight in the struggle and the fight, while robot warriors drone in flight. Smoke