An Appeal

by ST

America, wake up!
Let go this dream of a carefree childhood--
You forget care that then wrinkled you brow.
You had all to cope with that so young a one could--
By comparison small indeed with what you face now--
Now you have grown up, and so have your troubles.
Life is not a summer spent wading, splashing in streams,
Running through fields, flying kites, blowing bubbles in the breeze;
You can't escape reality, even its hum-drum, in dreams.
Dreams delude with a rose-tinted past,
Or shade your today that you can't see it clearly;
The good of a dream is to prescribe, that at last
A more perfect vision will correct an outlook now dreary:
Dreary as life is, with its blahs and double blahs.
This fantasy will only make things worse;
Romanticizing never mended any flaws,
And someday, not distant, this glass bubble will burst.

America, wake up!
Open your sleep-filled eyes.
Troubles are here, they are now,
They stare you in the face.
They do not flee from thee,
Nor can ye flee from them.
You will run into a wall
And smash your haughty nose
If you walk with your eyes thus closed.
Wake up, America.

written in the late 1970s