Neighborhood Watch
by Don Gordon
They are waiting for the night visitor
Who comes unseen through the iron grid.
They are praying for the family jewels
Or the sacred white jaguar
Locked in its cave in the dark.
Meanwhile the dehydrated old man
Is dying of loneliness in his house.
The widow next door strangles a cat for the same reason.
The husband and wife in the doomed bungalow
Are on the crumbling edge of mayhem.
A country in love with itself
Cannot regurgitate its worldly goods in time.
It awaits the millennium in the museum
Where the stuffed eagle stares with glassy eyes
Into the lean and ghostly past.
(from Don Gordon: Collected Poems)
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
Lyle, I want to add that one of the remarkable things about Don Gordon's poems is that their language is so free of cultural clutter that they can resonate in any era. There are poets I enjoy whose work is so larded with the detritus of brand names, celebrities, TV show and film titles, that future readers will require quite an apparatus of footnotes to makes sense of it all. It won't
Oh yes. It's déjà vu all over again….
Great Don Gordon poem. And yeah, the Reagan years, though it also reads like it could have been written this week, doesn't it.<br /><br />Thanks for posting this.