A System Of Perpetual Hope Poem by Caroline Misner

This is the day we’ve all awaited:
the buses idle, queued along the boulevards,
to bring in the masses of smiling supplicants.

They disembark, take their places on the lawn,
roost upon green statues when all standing space is gone.
Barely a blade of grass will show.

It is noon and no shadows puddle
the squares and avenues, where voices grow
as voices do in this moment of triumph.

Music haunts the enclaves through a sound
system of perpetual hope, plumes of breath
hover over heads that pock the bleached balconies,

the whitewashed salted streets. In the deepest
cavern of winter, hope taps the frigid air
like a pulse, to see a day we thought would never come.

The man is the show, in a red tie, a pin in his lapel;
he fumbled his oath, this man of destiny.
And so ends an irretrievable era.