What Was Right Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Errors of a pueblo-
There is your brown family gossiping around
A surrendered flag
And on Monday I’ll get up and go to school
Again, noticing all to whom I’ve been around:
See the parade of
Chivalrous insects in a chorus whose songs I
Cannot understand,
While far around here the moats of housewives
Lay with lavender painted toes:
They swing in their own shadows,
And smell like insomnia’s jasmine-
And they lay painted on the road back to the
Orange groves,
Or the smoking prairie grounds of rum:
Listen to them echoing in the bathroom- see them
Playing over the concrete-
They stay up all night batting lashes at foxes
And smelling so bitter sweet:
And the libraries keep their lights on,
And the tourists return to echoes- and the ash
Falls on her shoulders like small cathedrals
As changes to meet him in the tall weeds around
The swing-sets of her echoes:
She changes to meet him, singing like a humming bird
Stuck underneath the moon after midnight-
After all of that metamorphosis was stylized and
All of us were reminded of what was wrong
And what was right.