Raw Goods

The Rapture

We screw gypsum board across attic rafters,
cram loft mattresses into Victorian pantries,
craft backyard shacks into fugitive refuges,
but we still can't close detention centers.

Import stores scrape graveyard shards,
bargain furniture to discount ruin.
Stolen goods turn tungsten into deals,
but we still can't stop the torture.

The best forget our history, the worst
package it for markets; abandoned camps
line river banks where empty shops once burned.
Anarchist pavilions sold, then gutted and torn down;
Surely some retribution is at hand.

But when the quartered limbs were piled,
all is waste and worthless tillage
that arrives from bartered pillage
in the chaos of the global village,
where armored cars escort pens-for-hire.

Then churches rose over corner stores,
selected peasants ascended to heaven,
drew lotto tix as sacred writ against
martyred pilgrims at train stations.

Supermarts flew across the seas, praised
"better living through chemistry"
to feed the North with patent seeds;
suicides climbed, a swelling tide,
to match Monsanto with their pride.

The valley's flooded, the village cannot plow;
blindfold and handcuffed, marked with hidden scars
from cattle prods and waterboards;
men and women wait to be redeemed.
New slaves fulfill the tyrant's dream:
ten cents an hour, felons work the field.
What explosive breasts, their contents here conjoined,
wrap themselves in bomb-lined belts, the beast already born?

posted by judy j @ 9:54 AM