Republeo and Demjuliet (Prologue)

William Sheepsheer hath undertaken a new play,

which will be performed by us from day to day.

Nowadays as we shelter, bumps on a Covid log, 

Cousin Will presents his play’s prologue:

Two polarities, both alike in indignity,

in fierce America, where we destroy our dream,

From political grudge erupteth Covid enmity,

Where pandemic vitriol renders sanitized hands unclean.

From forth the Covided  extremes of these two politicos

A host of vilifying fanatics whip up their rhetorical strife;

Thus do these locked-down, distanced foes

With their hostility destroy our national life.

The fearful spreading of this dread contagion

As the fierce infection of these factions’ rage, 

Which, made more lethal by our polarized ragin’

Is now the two months’ traffic of our national stage. 

And yet, if we with moderation could attend,

What the politicos do screw up—we shall strive to mend.

Our play will be acted by yon citizens in the land of the free;

It appears to be a tragedy, but needeth not to be.

To be or not to be—that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in our nation to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous politics,

Or to wear masks against a mist of Covid,

and by cooperating end it.

Glass Chimera

Religion Relapse

How odd it is—as a 21st-century scenario sets itself up—
we see the world gone mad preparing again to erupt.
So unforeseen it was that our great Argument of the Ages,
the dogmatic contentions of cadres and sages
should abandon the trappings of intelligent delusion
and revert to jihadic religious intrusion.

Europa intelligentsia had decided that God was indeed dead,
and they talked for a few generations of what to do instead:
whether a capitalist path or the communist wrath,
then a communist road or a big fascist goad—
And in the midst of all that
polarizing ideological spat—
we waged two world-class wars to settle the matter
of who should wield power and who should be scattered.

You know the drill;
it persists among us still:
Who should be in charge?
a strong-arm few or the people at large—
a fascist state or some proletarian rabble,
by authoritarian edict or sectarian babble? 

After all the holocaust horror and gulag gangrene
we plummet again to mucky slog of humanic bad dream.
Obsessive jihadi encircle the world;
believing their fanatic flag will fully unfurl.
Back at the hub the elite are perplexed,
while their technocrat cadres compute the complex
as the widening gyre of the jihadi fire
leaps higher and higher and higher and higher.  

Perhaps the privileged, enlightened elite
should renew communion with the (wo)man on the street
whose faith in a sacrificial, Prince of Peace deity

brings resurrection instead of  jihad enmity.
Could it be that the God who was tossed aside
by the godless secular bureaucratizing tide
is actually the same eternal entity
who spoke our world out of chaos infinity?
Oh, let us recover some providential indemnity,
and by this testament regain our serenity.
After the Enlightenment, the Ideology, the Decline and the Fall,
Think about it the repentative way: Selah, y’all.

King of Soul