Sun of the Summer, Sun of the Middle Ages

•

I.

Some of the sunlight yellows with age
as it reaches us in the morning,
already someone's hair crumbling
in waves of incoming brightness.

What's that in the mouths
of those who desperately want
to keep things the same as in 1350?
Nothing freezes for long
around here. Even the iced poles
of the planet migrate in time.

II.

While journalists are watching that,
behind their backs, those who desperately want
alter the funding. Everything can be explained,
after they've died off for unthinkable
solar heavens it would seem to be.

They would have it be
where they gather again,
their luggage somehow intact,
their identities known,
where they'll be sunning themselves.

Soon will come a radiance
where they'll be swimming,
overcome by terrible awe and joy,
like a squiggling gang of hot sperm

released by love into raptured earnestness
whose life potential must be protected,

their shapes glowing from white-hot
pre-lobal furnace fires,
as afternoon below pours,
crackling from a military barrel.

III.

In neighborhoods they've left behind,
their servants will fly off
into the future, landing here
in these rooms in Portland
as if nothing new has happened.

Visiting anthropologists will soon
be discovered living with us,
even as titanium satellites orbit
their infrared lasers overhead
and spectroscopically harvest energy
from the middle ages of this summer.