Ann Aesthetic: To Sleepwalk, perchance to Dread.

La Fleur du Mal.

Each day, little by little, I see tender hearts harden, 

Whether reading the news or tending my garden

Where the composted earth lies velvet and plush

Fed by recycled branches and dried leaves once so lush,

So in every corner that was once desiccated 

Grows a healthy flora, quite variegated. 

The reader, perhaps has already had enough of my rhymes. It's just that with all the talk of virus and beaches and indoor gatherings, it seems the uplifting delight of seeing spring's dawn, or relishing its sweet scent before your first yawn are offering gentle charms that are generally being ignored. But when you walk out on such days, after weeks of confinement, how delightful it is to see nature's abundance. Here and there while a grey sky still twinkles with fading stars, the light waves of a moist breeze stir the air; newly-leafed trees rustle, still immersed in shadow, while you hear the soft movement of invisible fauna, or hear birds start chirping as they sip the morning's dew from petals of a yellow-flowered arbutus that's soon aglow with wet sun-dappled leaves. The air chills you slightly, so you hunch your coat up around your ears, but by the time you've walked a block or two, the air grows brighter, the horizon clearer, the sky is lightening, so the clouds start whitening, while well-tended urban patches of green emerge from night's umbra. In the meantime dawn has burst into flame; strips of golden light streak across the bluing sky, dispelling the last wreaths of mist still lurking in the shade. The lollypop trees that dot the sidewalk start awakening and seem to be fluttering their branches as sparrows twitter, revealing their presence, having invisibly settled there for their nighttime's nestling.  As light floods over the world your heart trembles within you like a little bird itself; everything is so fresh, so gay, just absolutely lovely; you feel you can see for miles, the air is so sparkling, the weather so perfect. You step lively now, assume a brisk pace. The sun is rising quickly, the sky is so clear. Then you ascend a hill ... what a view! The ocean a gold dome blinding and vast past low-lying hills where gulls veer and squawk, heading toward the sea, while an errant hawk is being bedeviled by a pair of crows, their black feathers shimmering shards of violet as they catch and scatter the rising sunlight while pestering Mr Hawkeye away from the morning morsel he had hoped to make of their chattering offspring. Turning toward downtown you can see the transit tracks winding their way for several miles, still but a faint metallic shimmer but already screeching with trolleys bearing their load of early risers off to work. I'm greedily breathing in lungfuls of morning air when I hear a peep peep behind me and see a bird so wee it could fit into the palm of my hand, yet even were my fingers to close around it, it would suffer no harm. It flits from branch to branch peeping with each leap; I feel almost honored that it would feel such safety although it's so close I could just about reach out and nab it like a pesky mosquito.

But such transports are by their very nature  transitory, and soon enough my reverie is shattered by a squawking radio declaiming about those callous congregating youth, caring nothing for their elders, as they gather in mobs cajoling and bursting with healthy energy, so that their ardor and spring fever-born exuberance make it hard to seriously blame them. Especially when I think of what we're leaving them in our wake, how dare we criticize them for not thinking of others? Do we care a fig when we fill a 3-ton SUV's tank? Are we thinking of them when we climb into a jet, fracture a continent or "borrow" from their future to amass an arsenal of nuclear arms we swear we'll never use, despite the trillions of dollars robbed from their future while economists such as the self-congratulatory Paula Krugman, grouse about "The Paradox of Thrift", which decries the selfishness of people with barely a pittance salting away part of their paltry earnings so as to have a cushion for when they're thrown out of their job? But what is the difference, that's what I'd like to know, of burying trillions in silos, from which they'll never emerge? Dollars hoovered right out of the economy to lie buried and useless, a never-ending sucking sound destroying wealth, wasting an ever expanding proportion of the now-rapidly dwindling pie we call the GDP. Is that why they call them black ops, black pools? They form a black hole in the middle of the economy where money goes in, but never comes out.

Well, that moment's ruined;

damned radios. 

Or at least it is gone.

That static-filled reminder of our nation's atomization

has left me feeling forlorn, 

and rudely broken the spell woven

 by this sparklingly perfect morn.