The Stake

How do we tell the children, who
in their caged innocence grow
ignorant of the slow blind calculus
that we, knowingly, take to our lungs.

How do we tell them that the green
boot of commerce outweighs a grand—
mother’s soft pink hand, her kiss:
the butcher’s knives flash, the pigs wrapped.

Uncontained among the bravado
and the vanities of self, the taker breeds,
unseen — molecular in the bliss
of the now indifferent. Tell them nothing.

They’ll ingest the math soon enough
and see that integers, when multiplied
over time, grow far beyond comprehension,
the least of them consumed by the stake.

Image: Jr Korpa on Unsplash

7 Thoughts

  1. Devon, the children’s innocence will haunt them the rest of their lives- literally ‘staked’ to the torture they endured at the hands of a modern day Gestapo. Your writing plummeted us into a mere breath of their twisted existence. Excellent.

    1. Ugly times, Lance. Ugly times. Complicity under the guise of “Liberty” will be our undoing and it will be up to them to pick up the pieces of our failures. We leave them woefully unprepared.


      1. Ugly, indeed. ‘Give us your tired, your poor…’ did not mean death camps for migrants. The damage done is irreversible, Devon. I just understand why it was allowed to happen, yet let alone be stopped!

      2. Yes, the lie is exposed before the world, institutionalized and cutthroat. We’ve all been sold a bill of goods, but there are some of us that believe that while the damage cannot be undone, we must confront the myth, tear it down and build anew. This we can do with respect, humility and gratitude.


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