A Just Representation

by Christopher DeGroot (September 2018)

Two Men Waiting, Malcolm T. Liepke, 1995

 

You need only call me brother in earnest to

enter into my world.

You need only know

it is adequate response that matters,

never a body, and for the burning

it is always possible, luminance.

 

For I’ve seen you,

your face a grimace,

your speech a sigh,

you can’t wait

to get done work and

go home to your brother

since you live together

and after work

get drunk together,

though still always alone.

 

I come from lovely Philadelphia.

You should call me brother and say

these States have become strange.

 

It is that we pine in fallow vistas

as though hardened spines were for sale.

It is that our proud draping wants no measure,

and though we’ve grown so thirsty,

we spill the water from our pail.

 

There should be a new vow or nothing.

Give a scale to our melancholy.

Simply dignity or nothing.

 

Brother, turn,

lest this false life prevail.

 

 

 

______________________________
Christopher DeGroot is a columnist at Taki’s Magazine and senior contributing editor of New English Review. His writing has appeared in The American Spectator, The Imaginative Conservative, The Daily Caller, American Thinker, Jacobite Magazine, The Unz Review, Ygdrasil, A Journal of the Poetic Arts, Reckonin’, and elsewhere. Follow him at @CEGrotius.

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