Where will it be?

Here…on the shores

of
this
nation?

Where will it be?

That future lost wondering
seething and shambling
generations will come
stand shaky, un-kneeling,

stand in hushed horror,
stare at the gates,
the looming blank gates

and the haunted
and harrowing houses
within
the walls of more walls…

Where will the cries
and the screams
and the howls
of the dispossessed
and the long dead
ring and groan

and echo and moan
on the winds that strain hard,
try in vain cold-scourings
to blow clean and to cleanse
to exorcise acts
of horror…and hatred…
in-hu-man-ity…

Will it be in
the beautiful mountains
so pine-covered, veiled
in gauzy soft blue?

Perhaps down beneath,
in the swampy and wonderful
croaky and crawly den
of ancient gators?

Or built
in the bones,
on the bleached
and unburied
bones of the hot
painted deserts?

Or nested
so comfortably
ensconced, a proud present
plover quick-picking
and plucking the carrion
from fetid gums
in the gaping sheer mouth
midst the bracing, imposing
implacable teeth
made of jagged still
mountains?

Or bleeding forever on
the shores of the seas
and the grieving shrill cries
of the gulls…
of the gulls…
oh…where will it be?

Where will the haunted
ziggurat hunker,
a crater at home
in the wastelands and horror
of inhuman time,
of living black holes
of hatred that sucks
all the life and all light
into

the dark
pusillanimous
core?

Where?

there…

on the shore…