Retrospective Sonnet
Our breakfast was ruined. We worried about whether or not
we might have won had not the Chinese intervened. Our push
to the Yalu River fell into disarray while we were waiting
for the milk to pour upon our cereal, cream for our cup of coffee.
And what if the British had not been preoccupied with Napoleonic
wars on the continent of Europe, what then? What if two oceans had
not protected us for all those years while we struggled to build our
nation, our empire, our city on the hill? What if the hunters had not
come out of the forest, what then? And, as if the past were not enough
to worry about, the future brought even more worries to our breakfast
table. What if the kids, the children, proved impossible to domesticate,
impossible to place into schools that would assure them a future we
might have wanted for ourselves? What if that swing vote on the Supreme
Court had swung the other way? What might have happened then?
Hal
Halvard Johnson
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