To The Defeated Gods Poem by Robert Rorabeck

They were laughing and they went to school:
Some of them while they were
Still young, anyways: and soon in the dead of
Winter,
They will be searching for coal,
As the butterflies die in the forests even as the
Turtles come to them:
All of it remains unpublished even as the
Stewardesses fly over graveyards-
Even as I have written so many psalms of so
Few words,
Trying to abstract myself into the ashes of another
Playground,
A metamorphosis trumpeted into the flags of our
Country while some poor girls
Have still been busy singing, trying to
Make diamonds from the coal of their fathers’ mining:
As the world stretches up to the defeated gods
And somehow pretends to carry on.