Michael Simms: Nightjar
Why should I care whether automobiles carry dead drivers off the empty highway into the forest? Should it bother me if influential briefcases no longer swing through the canyons? Or empty suits forget how to climb the stone stairs of the courthouse? Should I feel sad when the giant steel cages hold only the bones of men? I’d love to watch skyscrapers collapse from within, each floor heavy with the years, windows widening to let the wind blow the important pages away like so many lies. Shouldn’t we rejoice when great ocean liners no longer plow the plastic sea to unhappy islands but lie in the coral dark, mollusks building palaces of calcium on their hulls? God who once loved us no longer requires our praise, delighting Himself alone with the meadowlark. A crow lifts an unseemly voice to heaven, and a nightjar flies over the ruined houses carrying a soul, passing it from one bird to the next, never content with its song.
Copyright 2021 Michael Simms
Michael Simms is the founding editor of Vox Populi. His most recent collections of poems are American Ash and Nightjar (Ragged Sky 2020, 2021).
Vox Populi 
Great poem Michael! I love the images!
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Thanks, Deborah. I admire your poems as well.
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Beautiful in its truth. Thank you.
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Thank you, Barbara!
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“God who once loved us no longer requires our praise.”
Startling but….who could blame her?
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exactly. we’re destroying creation.
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Michael–this poem really gets to me. Those final two stanzas are especially powerful and poignant!
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Thanks, Sharon. Your praise means a great deal to me.
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Nice poem.
Covid can not penetrate.
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I hope you’re right, Saleh!
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