Midterms

If a horse meets fire, can we finally find our way?

Galloping through flames seems everyday now, so how can we rise higher?

I’ve always loved a lighthouse, guidance containing glow for safe harbor.

Steep trails to meet for us to be that here…if we feed the ember together, could it be that year?

Nothing but questions and suggestions of directions, but when does muscle meet ground for hauling us around…are we too heavy or simply too many, too far apart to make that distance count for anything other than counting us out…it’s not as if the world is watching, is it?

As if the future cries?

Steeped in grief as bitter as tea left weeks to taste nothing but tannins and dust…is there a team in harness we could resurrect? All I’ve drunk is ashes as I’ve watched homestead be torched, stock all stolen, salt sown deep in fields never left fallow for long enough to grow again.

So it would seem as sudden sun to lifetimes of midnight hour if some American dream were to come to pass, but the tinder may be wet and the wood left scattered like abandoned ideals we could never make flesh.

What sort of creature here will define our cosmic year as the best of us go begging and the rest are stone with fear or rivers of exhaustion, washing themselves away in the effort to still somehow run…I wonder?

All skies now are thunder, unable to hear each other for the sound effects sent flashing with horizons cut in lines set afire where none know if it was lightning or one more threadbare attempt at daylight.

What make we now of all that burns and races, what carriage have we for some proper use of fuel to warm, to realize, to shine…they said some city, they mentioned some hill, as they shoveled us under to muffle our agony, muzzle our mouths, for we would have raged out for that steel lady, arm raised high, with words better than our common practice.

Are we nothing but madness, malice, and all that screams away into inferno as the final, fatal turn?

All countries have their sun. All suns have their set. All have been betrayal in games of ladders matched with traps.

Can some starstroke of heated equine lore in fairgrounds of matches jagged by design somehow beat that?

Cut under, ground down, sodden and drought-cracked all at once, this bedraggled track smothered with fanfare and gilt phrases. Do countries keep their own meanings?

For the score we’ve kept, perhaps only reckonings, hauled on flogged backs of those denied a grander passage.

Passing into our own fable, huffing fumes of wistful fiction as factions torch each stable, and the turning of night skies leaves us lost in legend of a never-was and always has-been.

So we look lost into a fog hatched in the “ago”, as we are gone but here in a swift and scorching year, with myth in place of matter as what matters goes begging, desperate for the scraps of some lauded marble circus.

It should never have rested on ancient timekeeping to be what time it is, to mark seasons or reasons.

So exploding constellations become the last grasp.

Run and fire. Run fast.

Copyright © 2026 by Amy A. DeCew, all rights reserved