Sapphire Of World Peace
© Surazeus
2025 03 27

Luminous phantom of the great egret
spreads her delicate wings in doting breeze
and glides grandly over wind-rippled lake
that glitters blue as sapphire of world peace
with secret message from her aching heart
that Nature still blooms after we are gone.

Drinking root beer at the old picnic bench,
Sophia watches clouds gleam over houses
where people are living safe in their faith.
"I cannot feel bombs rattle family homes
in that distant land far across the sea
where my ancestors lived centuries ago."

Tossing the fantasy novel she wrote
into the sapphire-blue lake of world peace,
Sophia declares with sarcastic voice,
"The political game in this great land
has gotten so absurd that comedy
has been neutered by their incompetence."

Covering her face with thin paint-smeared hands,
Sophia cries with broken-hearted angst
as she thinks about how her mother died
because her social security funds
were blocked from transfer to her bank accounts,
so she died when the bank foreclosed her house.

Walking past the shuttered car factory,
Sophia climbs stairs to her studio
where she stares at the half-finished portrait
depicting homeless people in torn tents
who cook canned soup under the highway bridge
where an Amazon delivery truck gleams.

Dipping stiff-haired brush in glob of red paint,
Sophia paints barely-seen smudge of blood
on hands of the banker in clean blue suit
who blithely drives his new gold-painted car
past encampment where seven people live
whose homes he foreclosed over the past year.

Peering close at figure of the old woman,
Sophia paints the yellow flowered dress
her mother loved to wear attending church,
who now pushes shopping cart of her things,
including books of family photographs
of her ancestors the past hundred years.

"Our spirits become part of this alien land
when we bury our parents in its soil,
and our words become the wind in its trees."
Streaking white flash of light, Sophia paints
luminous phantom of the great egret
gliding grandly over the homeless camp.

surazeus.blogspot.com/2025/03/…

Orpheus photographs homeless people at the camp under the highway bridge, and listens to their stories about how government services they relied on were cut.

#Poetry #Poem #Pastoral #Necropastoral #MetaModernism #MetaRomanticism #NewSublimity #NewRomanticism #AmericanDream #Cinemism #Existentialism #Surrealism #NegativeCapability #NewGnosticism #MetaRealism #NewTranscendentalism #Astarism