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10/4/2020

Dominoes

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This week I’m offering something completely different. Friday night, after trying—fruitlessly—to keep up with the news relating to the COVID-19 cases swirling among our government’s highest officials, I woke in the middle of the night with the following words running through my brain. I finally got out of bed and wrote them down.
​
You will see, clearly, that I have no training as a poet. I know nothing about proper forms or meter or rhyme schemes. So I hope you’ll read this as my nocturnal wordplay, an example of what happens when my subconscious wrests control from my conscious thought. 

I have not altered what I captured during those feverish moments. I have not allowed subsequent news or insights to inflect these thoughts. I offer this simply as one citizen’s subliminal attempts to make sense of the harrowing world we live in.
​

​As the Dominoes Fall

​I wake up and wonder: 
Was it all a dream? 
This fever-pitched
Swampiness holed up inside my head
For what seems like millennia 
But was only long enough
To topple democracies
And eradicate futures and pasts,
Fury and white-hot hate
Scorching our throats and 
Trampling our dignity

Until one by one they started to fall,
Hubris humbled by truth,
Surrendered to a force 
So tiny it arrived
Undetected by the 
Armies forming in our streets,
Long guns tossed over shoulders,
Chants rending the night,
A force too subtle for their
Rigid minds, too potent for their 
Star Wars defense.
​
We had thought it a scourge,
Nature doing battle against
Man’s unconscionable crimes.
As we watched helplessly
Thousands succumb—a million--
​Innocents 
lost,
Our heroes, our warriors,
Our suckers
Who shared this precious gift and
Delivered us, our nation,
From certain death.
​

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6 Comments
Robert Mcwilliams
10/4/2020 07:23:19 pm

Well done. At first I typed beautifully done But nothing of this beautiful except your ability to capture the essence of what is going on in our world.

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Elizabeth E.
10/5/2020 04:02:54 pm

Thank you Sallie for this....like you, I would like to share your thoughts with some of my local colleagues. In our area we are a focal point of extremes....the most narrow minded are imports, eager to battle in our streets for a path they themselves don't understand

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Fonda McWilliams
10/5/2020 11:32:50 am

Wow, Sallie! You have really captured something that feels true here...and, of course, I love that it comes right out of the dream world. :) It is the greatest of ironies that this little microbe might just be the catalyst that changes our course and saves us in the end. It's the old paradox at work: it is only when we suffer that we are moved to change and grow. By the way, your poetic sensibilities are very strong, in my view. It's a very nice poem!

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Tessa Bishop Hoggard
10/5/2020 11:37:25 am

You beautifully weaved words that capture America's current state of chaos. How I yearn for decency to descend from those sworn to justly uphold the laws of the land! Jim Bannister was right about Marvin Gaye's 50-year old song called What's Going On? Like the song's lyrics, your poem is so relevant today.

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HANNAH HELM
10/5/2020 11:14:08 pm

That is an amazing little piece and a appropriate analogy for our times.

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Bob Patrick
11/1/2020 05:24:42 pm

I would say your free verse style is pretty darn good. Sure captured many elements of the Covid crisis in a very concise piece. The dominos continue to fall -- a woman died from Covid on a flight from Las Vegas. Except for 3 flight attendants, no one was notified till the new media investigated.

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    Between the debilitating effects of age and the 24-hour crush of mind-bending news, my brain is frequently in a fog. Nonetheless. I'll occasionally try to sweep aside the ashy gray matter and shed some light on what's going on at Murky Press. Perhaps together we can also gain a little insight into how we can better use words to organize and clarify the world around us.

    Cheers! 
    Sallie Showalter, Murky Press 

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