The Coming Storm
sooner or later
one of the hurricanes of moral panic
that hits the coasts
of our collective psyches,
with the floods of outrage
they drive ahead of them,
is going to break the outdated levies
of our social order,
which were created in simpler times,
to weather far smaller storms.
amidst the detritus of distrust
they leave in their wake,
ruined tracts of drowned ideas,
good and bad alike,
soiled by the indiscriminate waters
of the rising tide of outcries.
in this world-made-new,
the few high points,
now become the only landmarks visible
above a waterline
that hides with a callous indifference
the now irrelevant roads and paths of connection they once conveyed
and the impotent boundaries of walls and fences that once were thought so indelible.
and then, as the waters rise
while the desperate
make for ever higher moral ground,
islands amidst the spreading lakes of uncertainty,
amidst the trouble waters
we find the most vulnerable;
caught between the tandem fears
which drive them
to try and protect their humble lots,
or be washed away themselves
being that their own simple means
were ever too narrow
to read the mood of the rising storm,
too small
to change the bearing of rivers
whose courses had been set,
the once deep mouths now silted up
over many seasons past,
of sources in turn,
born on such distant slopes,
of mountains so ancient
they rise only
in the vaguest imagination
of the most contemplative hearts.