Still, steel gray, old, corroded, it hangs
as bodies of innocents have hung down the centuries;
suddenly now the bell begins to toll.
The striking of the clapper spills fear into our veins.
Children hide behind their parents.
The world we call home is vanishing.
Where to turn? Heat a can of soup?
Listen to music of long-dead composers?
Gaze out over this valley half-clad
in golden leaves, waiting for winter?
Like the glaciers, public trust is melting fast.
In the speed of events, emergency brakes are failing.
Hands at the throat of Lady Liberty
are throttling her into silence.
We imagine her headlong fall:
her bronze-green beauty— born of a dream
“Liberté, egalité, fraternité” so often betrayed.
Enfeebled, will she collapse in a heap of rubble,
drown in the rising waters of New York Harbor—
extinguishing that light we steered by?
Is country a place simply to live?
Or a dream, folded carefully, stored half-forgotten in a vault,
its essence rising from the Lincoln Memorial,
dappled with fallen cherry blossoms?
Peggy Brightman started writing poetry seriously with Harold Bond at the Cambridge Adult Education Center. A professional dancer & choreographer, she has also been active as a visual artist. In 2016 she started writing poetry seriously again, and has been a member for two years of the Woodstock Poetry Workshop, in Woodstock, VT. She resides in Quechee, VT
