The Times That Burn the Brain

by Brett Rutherford

(I hid a few rhyming poems in The Pumpkined Heart. This was one of them.)

The times that burn the brain are few:
when art commands that love be shed;
when you last expect to see the dead,
now truly gone, come into view;

when abstract thoughts become mere breath
upon the tongue, and Liberty
lies down with chains and musketry;
when you admit that gainless death

burns thousands from a tyrant brain
and murder stains your nation’s face,
as one by one the storms erase
all freedoms in a bloody rain;

to climb a hill before the dawn
and find your heart’s last village lost
into the concrete void of time,
to know the past is now beyond
your step, yourself a wordy ghost,
unchanging, in a rhyme.


1973, rev. 2019.