“Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”
-Bob Seger, Singer/Songwriter, “Against the Wind”
That our generation naively assumed
that change was due, the status quo doomed.
And now life ends without a boom
and barely a whimper—often too soon,
and in the algorithm a debt
to Mother Earth, from acute neglect.
That we would soon lose innocence,
first in a motorcade mid-Texas,
a jacket colored in blood, Chanel—
then Dante’s Inferno and jaws of Hell
as husbands and sisters jumped and missed
the earth Ground Zero, a concrete abyss.
That one day we would closely know
the breath at death—the exhale slow
as fading twilight—and vigils at night,
and plead to the dying to look for the light,
the beacon that leads to heaven—but when?
With sorrow we know what we didn’t know then.
