As its title signals, this week’s poem rides on some big abstractions, which is not easy for a poem to do. Maybe it’s the moment that we’re living in that makes these abstractions possible. It is also the unexpected swerves of language here, like how the leaders are “spackling / walls with new slogans” and how “We want our lives / to crackle with what isn’t frivolous.”

Stuart Kestenbaum is the Maine state poet laureate and is the author of four collections of poems, including “Only Now” (Deerbrook Editions, 2014).

Civilization

By Stuart Kestenbaum

We could be standing sentry over

Constantinople or Byzantium before that.

It’s a remarkable vista,

looking at the long march of history,

how technology propels us forward

and how conscientious all of our would-be

leaders want to appear. They are spackling

walls with new slogans, looking for

the momentum of sincerity.

That’s an impossibility, as unnatural as

fluorescent lighting.  We want our lives

to crackle with what isn’t frivolous.

We want to build domes

that will be shining in the sun.

We want the horizon to be ours.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2019 Stuart Kestenbaum. It appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.