47th President Poem: The Captain, by Richard Mahr

The storm rages
and rips the crew asunder
“Our captain is a danger.”
“erratic and unsound.”
“not the leader we expected”
“not the leader we had hoped.”

Most, not in vengeful fret
vote to set the man adrift.
“Let him live.”
“Surely, he had no wish to do us so badly.”
“It was the roiling sea,
the changing wind,
the creeping death in foreign land
that made him thus.”
A few vote for the plank.

But our captain does not go easily into the water
as we load the lifeboat to ease his passage.
He argues to those who listen
and those who judge
but his story is puerile and profane
and divides anew
the already divided.

Oh, that ranting, raving wretch.
that wracking, wrenching, wreaking captain
does not go easily into the night.
and our ship wearily drifts –
lurching side to side.

Richard Mahr
2023