Hard Times Poem by Robert Rorabeck

A bag of crooked angels
Mews like hungry kittens.
God slings them underhand
Into the reservoir
Because times are getting tougher
And he can’t afford to feed them;
But as they sink,
Like blowtorched feathers
They burn like a bag of fireworks
In playful leaps and shoots
And he watches the weak little
Demigods swim away
Like store-bought gold fish,
Like gold foiled leafs crinkled
In the demure light;
But their youthful, inexperienced bodies
Already attract the attention
Of convicts,
The children of the slaves,
The hungry pugilist fish
Who have survived
Molested into the wild.
The dark things swim up to the little
Candle-flames,
The great snuffing beasts, circling.
Before he can see what happens,
God turns away,
Because if he cannot see then
He cannot say
And blindness is a brand of medicine;
So slowly, though still a teenager
In the affects of progeria
He shuffles back home,
His back bent from carrying
Man’s sinning
He hopes to sleep for awhile
Longer in his secret garden
Hidden in his backyard surrounded
By technology’s new boom sounds:
The airplanes and delivery vans,
The power-lines and swimming pools.
Along his fence where life is still getting busy,
The busted virgins disrobing their wings,
Like alley cats screaming,
Having their filthy litters of crooked angels
God can no longer afford to keep them all,
The addicts of his glory
Strung out like Christmas lights
After they should have come down,
Because, for now, his season is over.