Poetry after Auschwitz? No,
Adorno said, “No way,”
Famously, but—what did he know?
“Well, what about today?”
Today, alas, the Muse is fled.
Civil society,
Its raison d'être, if not dead,
Is near mortality.
Ye English speaking persons of
America, take heed:
When ye forsake that “Greater Love,”
There’s nothing but to bleed.
The hemorrhage as has begun
Had best be stanched tout de suite,
For when the trickle starts to run
You’ll lose both chaff and wheat.
I did my best, as poets do,
But, poetry revoked
Therapy even can’t get through
When all the words are choked.