The Poems
byBob McNeil
Via Dolorosa (The Sorrowful Way)
While gazing into the hole where my hope used to be,
I considered my generation, replete with its sneaker—
soft, headphone-detached, video-diverted, Prozac-
anesthetized, computer-impersonal lives.
I considered my generation that was never drafted.
I considered my generation that never endured
a pride-deprived Depression Era.
The one undeclared war we all fought was with our Psyches—
a battle against our inadequate beings.
Our Great Depression was felt in the dustbowl of our heads,
and in cerebral shantytowns, all of us begged for attention.
While gazing into the hole where my hope used to be,
for more yard bird years than I was willing to confess in verse,
I remembered those dead-man-deaf days of being oblivious,
stone-still and asleep, wrapped in a blanket of apathy,
unaware of the world and its wants, the turmoil within its soil.
While gazing into the hole where my hope used to be,
from my inscrutable spirit to my phlegmatic fibrous cords,
on September 11th, 2001,
I felt the patriarchal pain of mankind’s loss.
I heard the tympanum-tearing,
heart-piercing cries of the maimed and martyrized.
Then, on that day of dismay, wrathful words—
alien as battlefields before my birth—were on my tongue,
and wrathful feelings—sharper than swords—
lacerated my being with rage.
While gazing into the hole where my hope used to be,
I felt decimated by destiny’s dark and stark turn.
I lamented this municipality’s metallic testicles
that were torn and shorn.
I filled lachrymatories for each stranger who was assassinated
by winged Luciferous legions.
While gazing into the hole where my hope used to be,
I praised a platoon of police, firemen, paramedics
and construction workers, the knight-and-hero-hearted,
who were trying to save the sheep-innocent from a slaughter house.
I cast prayers upon those with steel-clad courage
for fighting the grim grasp of the Reaper
on the rubble-buried masses.
I realized, despite their girders of grief,
these valiant citizens continued to make the vanquish
of this Republic seem victorious.
They let the poltroon minions of evil know
that despots will never have dominion
over a dream of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
While gazing, pride finally filled the wound in my American heart.
Copyright 2007
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