Blue Ruin

Robert Hill

--“I could forgive you if you were crazy. But you’re not. You’re weak.”

​

In normal times, we might 

examine our condition

and do better by some

standards, recalibrate  

our global systems, raise

rusty pitchforks against 

all the gouged prices. We

would surely individuate 

children, rafts of souls  

limned in ice-cold patterns, 

empty outlines on the seas.

Reclaim our hands—unify!

Craft sky-blue plans for incar-

nation, not incorporation. Pause 

in the rubble for flits of spirit-

breezes, and more, if things 

were normal. But now they are. 

It seems that we are normally 

both crazy and weak. Some more 

than others, no doubt, but what 

can we say to beg forgiveness? I 

didn’t mean it? I lost my head? 

Not my fault? History in a fog 

now, smoky glass as memory, 

that napalmed girl, Kim Phuc,

or that kid who sniped another

suspected of a bomb, and all 

those trudging bearded men

behind their grocery carts

flying flags and begging

as if they were guilty, some

few with personal trainers

coming to their lofts to keep

them svelte and coiffed as

if to meet today the greatest 

of them all, all alike. It is a ruin 

we have made. Imagination 

might have prepped us for crazy, 

if not for evil; it might have 

stretched our thews enough 

to strengthen, as that trainer 

might have said. We might 

have bent our backs toward joy, 

not dark regrets, oblivion. 

We might have imagined

down a long, dim runway

flights gone inward, silver

worms to unruin ourselves.