Today’s Poetic Asides prompt is “space.” My friend Linda’s prompt is “silver bullet.”
Faithless
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
These days we divine by numbers
and watch the spiral uncoil,
no longer lazy and languid,
but each day adding the sum
of an earlier day to the new total—
n = (n-1) + (n-3)—
like a poisoned Fibonacci sequence
with hiccups, unraveling into space.
And the madman on the television
is huckstering promises of easy endings
and fantastic fortunes, a silver bullet
for every ill, anything to raise his ratings,
and meanwhile the lions of jazz
are dying of the virus, the poor get poorer
and the sick get sicker, and the hospitals
are scrambling for supplies.
Rogue churches crowd sanctuaries,
passing the virus instead of the peace,
putting their faith in a man
who has proved himself faithless
time again and time again.
No lies, no arrogant bluster,
no matter how they will it so,
will save us now.
Perhaps this is a new survival of the fittest,
where fitness means a willingness
to listen to the science,
instead of the autocratic mumbling
of this fool of a leader
whose god may indeed
roar to life again come Easter–
the Great God Mammon,
trailing behind him
thousands of dying souls in his wake.
Mockingbird Chronicles 