The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Colin Dodds

Ares in the Third Millennium

It's all right there:

The post office done imperially,

but unlit.

Its windows dirty and scratched,

secured well though inelegantly,

insignias faded, limestone stained

by water, smoke and mold.

Beside it, a church announces

there is only one kind of whimsy,

one kind of power, one far-off and fatal truth,

only one throne.

But the ads on the cabs,

bus shelters and subway entrances

proclaim the opposite, the million permeations,

in their squalid totality.

That's only one of the wars

being fought for my soul tonight,

though the contenders

in the near-incomprehensible scrum

of the early twenty-first century

say there is no war—

just the best of all possible worlds