Voortrek
Twisting and deforming
Raging daemonic forces
Scream across the veldt.
Corkscrew clouds
Peeling off our thin, Formica-top civilization.
No Oz awaits;
Dorothy and Toto have headed for the shelters.
The only Munchkins, mutants.
Your fault
My fault
No fault.
We pulled the cork,
The Jinn gave their notice;
And History’s in its familiar whirlpool
With vertigo the fashion of today.
Like hunkered hedgehogs
Curled in spherical,
Lance-backed laagers,
We have one option:
Shut our eyes
And wait for the dust to settle.
— Zumwalt (1981)
zumpoems 
Comments on: "Voortrek" (5)
Very evocative
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Reblogged this on Ben Naga.
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Fabulous–too many good bits to choose a fave.
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Does the dust ever settle? I am waiting. Or have the Jinn turned it all to desert? Or is there a tornado that will blackly swirl out of Kansas to deposit the 1930s with flapper girls and poor men drunk with home brew into the formica of what is becoming civilization? A whirlwind poem if I ever read one.
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Well written – I can really feel the “this way and that”, the pull and turmoil in this poem. Like it.
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