.THE CRESTFALLEN.

There is the wave we ride and the foam
and one afternoon when I hear my old teacher
shouting in the street. It's too much for her:

that gay son, her overbearing husband,
and the New World with its runaway freedom,
so she goes mad and calls down curses

and is carried along by the wave that is more
than all the open wounds of politics.
Gulls and sparrows ignore her as they fly

above the glass river with their concerns
and I would help her madness, but when
I look back she is swallowed by shadows

around the corner and I remember a man
lifted by feathers of circumstance who
Nazis took to a cave near Rome and made

kneel to put a bullet in the back of his head,
and no one helped him even if they could.
And who helped you when they seized

you by the neck to not let go? And you saw
how all is carried up on waves of foam,
all the coming out and all the going home.

Bob Engler