ManicDDaily

This is a fresh-off-the-brain-press poem written for dVerse Poets Pub poetics prompt.  Today, it is to write something inspired by a bumper sticker.

So What if You Really Did Live in Germany in the 1930’s?

‘Live free or die’
easy enough to sigh
‘let me be me’
when it’s not really a choice
of to be or not to be,
but the voicing of
a complaint, the price
of sainted gas
is too damn–
(kind of half-assed,
if important in its way),
but what if your neighbor,
even the guy you’re sore at,
who plays the tuba at two,
and happens to be a Jew,
is dragged off in the night?
In your window, the light
of a seering torch;
on your porch
the pound of booted step;
and your wife has wept
with fear, your
children so very near,
and you know,
yes, although you know,
it’s terribly wrong,
and you long
(somewhere)
(somehow)
to dare
not to bow
to whatever inner voice
now says, the choice
is not your own.
Okay, you’ve got a gun
but you’ve also got
a son, and
they’ve taken his,
that neighbor–who–
he had one too–
not yours,
yours, who purrs
as he sleeps,
you see the peeps
of dreams beneath his eyelids–
what do you do then?