No parent gets a military car pulling up at noon

to their suburban home on abandoned streets

and instinctively feels, as

the unfathomable, irreversible despair does its piercing,

that life again will be grand.

No one, save the mad, is an optimist.

Optimism lives in the confused certainty of the moment

and continues only by sheer force of will,

like the suicide struggling to stay afloat

or light throwing itself in the infinite black,

at best a dot in some alien sky.

We, too, live upon a dot, a squiggle on the page,

hesitant, consumed by our fragility.

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