100 The Meadow but people, where children are not divided into groups of children whose parents have been taken from them. I will try to imagine a day when we can look into their eyes and apologize for hurting them. And I will try to write poems that assuage the unspoken grief with which they live. But the real poems will come from them. They will tell us what it was like to live in those cages when the oligarchs are gone. I will imagine a globe where what we have is shared, not hoarded, and where our understanding of one another is prized above our divisive history. I will return to books of all kinds for their wisdom as I try to fathom the depth of other cultures, other places who do not know this oligarch but know their own quite well. And nothing will take me from this pursuit of knowledge because I will no longer be told knowledge is useless when they are gone. And my word will levy strength once again, your word will levy strength, our words will convey solace again as even solace has gone into hiding. This election eve is a time of reckoning and we will take stock of what was lost and what was given. There will be days and months when that equation of malice can only be guessed at but we will find feeling in our limbs again, we will seek the daylight in all its clandestine hours—at dawn on the snow, mid-morning in the leafless branch of the maple, early afternoon in the shawl of a pale sky, and in the moonrise of last light. We will seek the daylight of winter and winter’s end so that this time will have become a considered marker of resolution. We will come to spring with our hands ready to employ one another in the carriage of justice and peace. And when these platitudes fail us, we will be at the ready to surrender to a higher ideal—a need of one another. A conscious decision to choose each other without reservation. I will be called the fool for even wishing this, let alone saying it on the radio. And when the oligarchs are gone the echo of the havoc left will ring with us for an endless sorrow and
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