This is an older poem, written right after the real estate bubble burst.
Hard Times: January 2009
The new year and the bubbles have burst.
Before Christmas, the neighbor’s yard was filled
with inflated hopes: Santa, Frosty, Rudolph
and the whole gang, spotlit and swaying
in their own breezes, towering
and teetering toward the holidays -
a homegrown Macy’s parade.
Now all those luminaries litter the lawn,
a collection of collapsed dirigibles,
deflated and dead, like wrinkled corpses
on a suburban battlefield, as if
the Grinch never learned to sing
and pulled the plug on them all.
They’ve been there for weeks.
Has that neighbor given up
and quietly moved out?
Or is he simply waiting for a miracle,
for Santa to rise again as the Easter Bunny
with all his eggs in some new basket?
Hard Times: January 2009
The new year and the bubbles have burst.
Before Christmas, the neighbor’s yard was filled
with inflated hopes: Santa, Frosty, Rudolph
and the whole gang, spotlit and swaying
in their own breezes, towering
and teetering toward the holidays -
a homegrown Macy’s parade.
Now all those luminaries litter the lawn,
a collection of collapsed dirigibles,
deflated and dead, like wrinkled corpses
on a suburban battlefield, as if
the Grinch never learned to sing
and pulled the plug on them all.
They’ve been there for weeks.
Has that neighbor given up
and quietly moved out?
Or is he simply waiting for a miracle,
for Santa to rise again as the Easter Bunny
with all his eggs in some new basket?
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