IRON ROOT
It’s possible we understand the common good,
since we are human beings
blessed with intellect, & feelings.
Might we live in the old neighborhood
again? The narrow streets of Providence
for example – haunted by ghosts
of Roger Williams & his hosts
Canonicus & Miantonomi (his friends,
working out in late-night conferences
the immemorial foundations
of good government). Nations
& peoples, grounded in the ancient senses
of those words (Pax, Libertas, Justitia)
sustained, beyond the bite
of Mammon (greed & spite)
into a vivid substance of reality –
dream-songe of every poet ever born.
Yea, Henry Acorn King
will of foundations sing,
laid deep before the civil wars began –
of Edw. Coke, bent over Magna Carta
(constitution of our civil rights
before the king, his knights,
were born); of Williams, apple of his eye
& visionary of our liberty
who felt the fiery seed
of conscience, freed
from all coercion, was the key
*
that opens up a box of keys –
the iron root of human
dignity (since we are one
with goodness only as we choose
to be). & how distinct this innocence
from those manipulations
of the Mammonites, evasions
of sadistic Minotaurs! The silence
of compassionate stars rebukes Caesar
& all his empires, murmurs
Hobo. His abode blurs
river-mud with gravity (cold graveyard
avatar). All density of stone
compacted into black hole
rings your somber footstool,
Everyman – refining stokehold of the sun!
& indistinguishable from hopeless hell
until the graceful whisper
of Columbia, your dove-sister,
thunders like lilting from a light-filled well –
like those Latrobes, who journeyed down to Delta
après shaping simple mansions
for America; or Hart’s dimensions
of Pacific promise… Ocean harmonies (selah).
So Hobo’s heart lingers (below the sweep
of salty galaxies, just off
the bridge). His brooding strophe
coos from orange shadows… azure keep.
2.15.20
