The Last Day of February 2025

On the eve of a clash of historic importance, a rupture of world order, and a push ever closer to a precipice, over which promises strife, and war, and plunder, and an overwhelming sense of finality. The end of the Democracy

The last day of February dawns unnaturally 
Warm, radiant skies; we took the bug convertible 
Up through the hills, past spring fields, forests of fir
And barren, mossy oak, glimpses of Cascades, towering 
Hood and Jefferson luminous white, majestic, 
Past overlooks of verdant farmland stretching miles
Across the valley to the shadowy Coastal Range,

The last day of February the President of the 
United States and his vice disgracefully assaulted 
The integrity of an ally, double-crossed the leader 
Of a country at war with Russia, historically our enemy
In the battle of Democracy against Tyranny
For the hearts and minds of the rest of the world,
And the potus and his vice broke our alliances,
Threatened world war, sided with tyranny, and
Dishonored the values of freedom, and history, and peace,
Pushing, pushing ever closer to war. We become the enemy.

Tonight, a glass of red on the balcony looking west,
Still mild, quiet almost, except roaring hotrodders racing 
Down River Road, have been since Covid, nobody stops it.
But I have the stars, Cassiopeia, Pleiades, Venus, stars
Innumerable in western darkness, dimmed only by
The lights along the highway leading to the coast,
Distant traffic passing billboards and businesses
Before becoming rural, farms and wetlands running
Out to the foothills, and I, surrounded in my fortress 
Of fir and cedar, watch from my ruins in the darkness
As we move into a grim, uncertain future,
Awaiting spring. Polaris stares down from the north, unblinking,
But I am without direction, at sea,
In a declining world. Alas.