Poetry Friday: "Perestroika 1988"

Yesterday's hearing in the Senate (to investigate the new charges that the Supreme Court nominee sexually assaulted a women when both were in their teens) was worse than I thought they would be--and I didn't even watch them.  As I was driving home at 5:00, NPR was broadcasting live from the hearing, so I did hear a little of the nominee's testimony--or was it an opportunity for Senators to blab on and on?  I switched to a CD of Mavis Staples.

For those who want a meditation or a prayer, see yesterday's post.  For today's post, it seems a good day for a poem, a poem that offers some hope and some wariness.  I have poems that are angry about the vulnerability of women in the world, but let me offer something a bit more optimistic.

The poem is clearly about the year 1988, which is a year before 1989, a hinge point in history when Communist empires seemed to collapse with very little warning, at least to most of us casually observing in the West.  Perhaps we are at a hinge again.  Let it be a hinge that opens the door to a better time, not an apocalyptic hinge like 1939.


Perestroika 1988



The world is about to lurch
around a corner, to emerge blinking
and sobbing into an unfamiliar light
from a formerly eclipsed star—but
we don’t know that yet.

We cower in the corners of our darkest
imaginings, learn new word pairings,
like nuclear winter. We warily
watch new Soviet leaders come to power,
only to die quickly. Our president warns
of Communists invading Texas,
while Central Americans swarm
across the border, not wanting to overthrow
our Capitalist enterprises, but to partake.

We suspect we’ll die in some conflagration;
each generation gets an apocalypse to call its own.
Instead, two clownish leaders create
treaties—a joke taken seriously
by each side. Walls crumble, borders dissolve,
the maps must be remade month by month.

This new sun shining on us will subject
us to new dangers, cancers of a different kind.
We prepared for a different apocalypse,
and so we think we’re safe,
not yet recognizing the new dangers,
global warming, ethnic conflicts, dark diseases,
formerly backup singers in the chorus,
now stepping forward for their solos.

But until we perceive the notes of new songs,
we can relish the sound of silenced terror,
bask in the sunlight, tourists on holiday,
sunburnt but able to sleep again.