Poem-A-Day: After the Election by Sarah Messer

After the Election
by Sarah Messer

Moonlight slept quiet beneath the grandstand,

like flower petals, like highway snowstorms, like 

   each thought
not of November or battlefields. My moping climbed

the Pegasus inside my chest which sped me to you
in this last century of petrol, with my socialism wanting.

I dropped an ocean in the penny. It was November. 

   It was
lost. My wish slept beneath the Pegasus, quiet

as a petrol station or the monotony of socialism,
as if each lesson was not separate from the thought,

but from the ballot box. Like a snow globe of wanting.
Like wanting thoughts not to be octaves. Not free

of the ocean, but of the battlefield. Like a grandstand
sleeping in moonlight, its flower petal confetti, its metal

steps like ballot boxes, sleeping empty now
beneath a dropped ceiling of balloons. 

 
Copyright © 2012 by Sarah Messer. Used with permission of the author.

Poetry by Messer

Bandit Letters

November 19, 2012

Sarah Messer is the author of Bandit Letter (New Issues, 2001). She lives in North Carolina.

Related Poems
by Lucie Brock-Broido
by Walt Whitman
by Donald Revell

Poem-A-Day started as a National Poetry Month program in 2006, delivering daily poems from newly-published poetry titles.

 

Due to popular demand, Poem-A-Day became a year-round program in 2010, featuring original, never-before-published poems by contemporary poets on weekdays, and classic poems on weekends.

 

Browse the Poem-A-Day archive for selections since 2010. 


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