Moon at Half Past Noon

We painted the enemy on porcelain skies,
a watercolor stain to explain the rain.
We gave him our fears, our unspoken lies,
and promised our hearts he was pain.

We built him from whispers on parlour-room walls,
from the silence that follows the toast.
We stitched him a coat from the evening’s appalls,
and named him the thing we feared most.

The soldier, my love, is the gardener’s own hand,
that trims the rose, blackens the soil.
The citizen is the sun on the land,
that coaxes the thorn from the soil.

No different they are, in the end, in the light,
both tending the roots of the tree.
One cuts the branch in the dead of the night,
one waters what never should be.

And this is the banality of evil, my dear:
Not a fire, but embers that glow.
The tending of hearths while the chaos draws near,
the love that refuses to know.

We are the quiet composers of screams,
setting dread to a waltz-time beat.
We are the weavers of terrible dreams,
on the looms of the quiet and neat.

We offered our scapegoat the weight of our soul,
a sacrificial, beautiful lie.
We thought that in burning him, we’d be made whole,
as the same ashen smoke choked the sky.

So look at our world, so polished and grand,
at the clockwork of days we adore.
And know that the gears are all moved by our hand,
and the key is under our own door.

The most terrible regime is not one of rage,
but of kisses that carry the germ.
It’s the book that we read to our children each night,
that quietly teaches the term.

It is the beautiful, functional, terrible art,
of a heart that has learned to agree.
The prison that breaks every hope and every heart
is the one we call “You and Me.”

<｜end▁of▁thinking｜>Of course.