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What the Future Dares ... till the Future dares / Forget the Past, ... "Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats," Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1821 Didn't you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew? "The Last Leaf," O. Henry It wasn’t about Behrman’s masterpiece or petals from the sick child’s flower, nor what the girl from Kansas found in the dusty back yard where real leaves darken and drop like packaged rainbows. Some few tout expired courtesies shifting with Alvin and Whitey, the boy who could not run as fast as his fellow, porches posing bare ruined choirs where late the latch key hides unlooked-for tyrannies among the stuff. It preceded a resumed cowardice poising us high on boards of water to surrender the hard won liberties. Such betrayals have always chased us hand in hand from pluming towers on descents for later repudiation. When the planes returned still pregnant human cargo, attendant baggage, fire, did upper reaches of the self-made labyrinth sense fingers trace to world’s oblivious center trailing shadows in art colony, belfry, slum, entrance to subways’ prophetic walls? They who passed above our non-plus entered that oblivion a defining wave of prey to revealed contagion planted in common furrow to our sustaining works and charities, craft, invention, cures for cancers, tau-mediated degeneration. Clear forensic eludes. At Krajina, Glasgow, Cairo, and Tashkent, the black sites render inventive wrongs: the forgetting in our darker dares coupled like smoke bled orchestrated immolations to leave us rocking spectators agape never-agains that haunt but not compel. Absent depone, the immolators emerged striding mists prefiguring such plumes with diminutives banned the learning places offering throats to goalish stanchions or stones drawn from a hundred hands like rain to wash our culpable extremes. Such excess tempts more forgiveness than found at Gettysburg and Shiloh reversing the rituals of desecration when dispatch to rightful station presaged approaching railway escort to gas chamber and killing field. It is here the daring flickers brightest through the discredited inmost veil threatening to torch creation’s face with Dream tales shaping civility through our disobedience. Then crowd shining eyes to memorial steps as less tremulous word goes forth finding time and place at Washington, Tiananmen, Sabarmati Ashram, Cairo again, now thawing in wind arrived from lift of Tunisian night. Generations ascend from their knowing to relearn the debt ceiling of intolerance adjacent the other jostling blunders waiting to append fresh bubbles and crashes, pyramids and labor towns, catastrophic alliances with their ruined streets. Blameless we forecast sidestep of killing fogs, mustard hued precipitation, fresh eboli sprung from canister or thicket, mushrooming gales on waves of light. With dam and inoculation, popular fiat, web, kinetic kills, daunting ducts and bridges, we thwart such contest to our sovereignty. These number deeds like star voyages. Though through genomic probings man should breathe the breath of lion, take on knowledge of scorpion, wisdom that is asp, we fear not advent of that strange and other soul. Then may human reach to silicon and frame its pre-sentient dust, inscribing her perfected image, speaking her Watson, new Deep Thought. Then could human breathe to Not the currents that may or not be soul. In that ecumenical hour of awakening, dull gaze lifted as from sickbed confusion, what dread hand or eye will move through gusts and any height demanded, with brush or finger settle leaf among brittle vinery, myrtle, or yew so fixed it should neither tremble nor fall? Updated version published Nov 30, 2023 Lothlorien Poetry Journal © 2012 David W. Parsley Parsley Poetry Collection