The Nightmare of Donald Trump's Inauguration

 

The Nightmare of Donald Trump’s Inauguration

By Jeffrey M. Bowen

(January 2017)

 

Somewhere as I half slept

An inauguration drifted.

 I dreamed of seas that moaned and wept,

By morning fog had lifted.

I thought it time to celebrate

A president’s arrival.

But then I choked and gasped “No, wait!”

The question is survival.

Democracy assures us  

That we still have a voice,

 But discord oozing like some pus

Reveals a fateful choice.

Arrogance is the lot we drew,

The facts we just ignore.

Hidden motives still abound,

And disguise events in store.

Somehow this seemed familiar,

As I drifted on the sea.

The sky was blue, the surface glass,

Thrown back a century.

 I floated with my jacket cinched,

Above I saw the towers

Of a massive ship still inching on,

Debris cast off in showers.

From her tilted decks it rained,

Life torn apart and screaming

Like some great animal in pain,  

Its entrails bloody streaming.

I felt so cold, cried out in vain,

As bodies floated round me,

I’d chosen Lusitania

And now the judgment bound me.

I thought my ship invincible,

So big, so fast, so vast,

But then what seemed unthinkable,

Became torpedo’s blast.

Because of warnings overlooked,

I thought I was protected,

But now I float amid the hooks

Of destiny infected.

Somehow I knew the time could come,

I knew we’d rue the day.

An inauguration struck us dumb,

Yet still we chose this way.

There’s no escape to safety,

My hopes have sunk like stones,

The Lusitania haunts me

 With the lessons in her bones.

 

The Lusitania sank in May 1915.

Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2017.

There is no such thing as a coincidence.