The Book Burner

Gazing out over the sacked and burning city, where noble dreams
Are extinguished and human memory cut off, the book burner stood

Upon a lonely hilltop; and a smirk was on the face of that harbinger
Of doom, as the walls had been breached and the people rendered

Defenseless, for the meek and innocent were now under the heel of
The barbarous, and the pyromaniac and the savage made lords over

All the Earth. Where does the heart yearn after the last embers have
Died away? Where does the moon glow when all the dreamers are dead

And gone? The flames devoured all that stood in their cursed path, as
The song of sickly cackling engulfed the garden of reason, erasing

Sacred dreams thus undreamed never, abandoned unto maws that know
Not hallowed brook, nor ethereal flight of the red hawk soaring, as

Minds yet unborn were dissolved upon the plains, lost unto time’s blind cruel
Morrow. In each hand the creature held a flamethrower: one was called

Racism, the other Sexism, and there was a third flamethrower slung
Over its shoulder that was called Anti-Semitism. And the books were

Cruelly murdered, they burned into the night, their ashes rising towards
The firmament, a lamentation without stars; faux left infidel raging

Through the nothingness, transfixed by the eye of Lucifer, hell’s bells
Striking forth of the Apocalypse, the void where no sweet memory yearns,

Faux left madman raging towards the maelstrom, led on a leash by the
Kleptocrat, with a dirty rag for a brain and a broken window for a soul,

The hourglass signals the end of a mute dominion, thrice cold eye unto
The mottled brook, as we fall into the ancient insatiable fires

David Penner’s articles on politics and health care have appeared in Dissident Voice, CounterPunch, Global Research, The Saker blog, OffGuardian and KevinMD; while his poetry can be found at Dissident Voice, Mad in America, and redtailedhawk.substack.com. Also a photographer, he is the author of three books of portraiture: Faces of The New Economy, Faces of Manhattan Island, and Manhattan Pairs. He can be reached at 321davidadam@gmail.com. Read other articles by David.