Jared Smith

Let the Drums Roll

We are all endangered,
and the drums begin to roll.
We walk the streets at night
past the scaffolding of our lives,
the factories now mechanized
where we served the bureaucrats,
the stone offices without windows,
the glacial disdain of billionaires
fed fool with artificial intelligence,
and yet we look for jobs for food
for warmth for children for family
for dignity for love for meaning.
We are real, are flesh and dream
and blood.  Let the drums roll.
Let the ground begin to shake.
Beneath our feet remains the land we built.
We are all endangered. Let the drums roll.

 

A Stiff Drink

I’m having a stiff drink tonight.
Snow falling outside the window
Outside the window in Washington too,
light mindless color of brainwashed stone.
After 75 years I have learned how to read.
The blood will come soon
after the trampled footfalls lying
in slush across the streets of our future.
Banded birds are flying to extinction.

I’m longing to get back,
Standing on my back deck
Looking up to the night sky
Between barren tree branches.
It has been a cold winter this year
But I look up into the constellations
And the clean air and wind binds me,
Pulls me toward my beginning and end,
And I am almost fooled and pulled in.

But there is more to do. My sons and daughters
Have been taught in all good faith the old rules
That would allow them to live with dignity and honor
If they would help those who worked hard
Or who needed help despite what life did to them.
A stiff drink will not help now.
I am too old to learn the new songs.
I am not too old to fight against the pull of stars
Latticed behind the trees that give us life.

But still snow is falling.
I take hope in the tracks of animals
Leading off into the wilderness beyond me.
I do not know where they are going
But I point them out to my children
And we celebrate they are going far from us
Deep into the natural world we have forgotten.

 

What Do We Do Now?

What do we do now
torn by the fires that sweep our land
rising from the grains we have planted,
now twisted and bittered by smoke?
Where do we go
when the institutions we formed for protection
roll over our futures as a tsunami?
What can we remember of what we are
where we came from, the wilderness
of flaming passion greater than this
furnace that bears down upon us,
a wildness where the mountains
touch dreams that fill our souls
sweeping the western wilderness
its gems and gold and stubborn mules
strong across the Midwest heartland
from the Rockies to the Appalachians
swept up into the Jetstream of America
sweeping across the eastern cities into
the nurseries of the Chesapeake and Everglades
where generations beyond ours grow.

We come from the stars.
Their dust fills our veins,
their light the light that fills our souls,
that give us breath give us thought
give us words from the winds
tearing across time and finding us.
We come from the stars, the cosmos
of which fear and death and guns
are insignificant parts paired up
of the atoms binding us together,
like the rivers running to infinite seas.

There is no man greater than we,
no man who can break our love,
who can withstand the human spirit.
And so we stand strong,  We write
what must be written.  We say
what must be said.  And we love
with a love that vibrates across time
and that can never be stamped out.
That’s what we do.

 

Jared Smith is the author of 16 books of poetry and hundreds of publications in literary journals and anthologies.  He is a host of Wilde Readings in Howard County, Maryland.