Fear and Awe

Spring. Same plants, same order.
Monday morning, open for business.
Tractor-trailers, day care centers.
Every leaf that’s coming out is out.

To tonight’s town meeting I will go unaware and foolish.
It’s delicious, the unimportance of my feelings.
Even our particular war was small.
Europe had one last a century.

Hubble photos of events 13 billion years ago
Do not put me in mind of the species’ insignificance.
Just the opposite having witnessed the universe’s birth.
But birth from what preceding state? God again rears his hoary head.

They say one must let go and will let go,
God will decide what tragedy you need.
Not every seed becomes a flower,
Not every branch breaks out like a prosthetic trombone.

While the ancient Romans wrote of love
The ancient Britons wrote of war.
The Romans should have been perfecting their republic.
No god could do that work for them.

The November moth's the fall cankerworm--Alsophilia pometaria--
Slender-bodied, beige, beginning life as the well known inchworm.
In our war more children may have died than would have had
      the tyrant lived in fear and awe.
We can never know because we conquered.