Because It Was No Longer Any Holiday Poem by Robert Rorabeck

It is happening right here, under the cockspurs of dreams:
All night long where the landed maids are going down into the
Ghostly corals of my mother’s rock gardens,
To sleep with the sleepless songbirds and the coral snakes;
And the moon turns as if dancing before the mirror
Of the minnow’s sea;
And it all seemed to be quite beautiful to the conquistadors
In the sand dunes of missing kidnappers before exhaustion took
Over and the blankets ate all of the army men;
And childhood slipped away through a forest of junked cars
And pornography: it became just as series of images happening in a
Zoetrope in a house where only the cats dreamed,
The Christmas tree blinking in the Morris code of forest fires,
Until the shadows turned in under the sun, curling like aloe that
Had already had its ecstasies,
And people returned to their hollow jobs, because it was no longer
Any holiday.