A Poem for the Days Before the Presidential Election

This poem appeared in the August/September 2011 issue of First Things. It is even more timely now.

Political Calendar

Spring like a popular insurrection rises
Against a winter government's assizes;

gone mad by June, its liberality
gives way to summer's fruitful anarchy.

Order returns in autumn as teh air
With libertarian chill grows doctrinaire.

Displacing fall, the winter vows to keep
a Tory world, conservative in sleep.

This pattern follows year end and year out
as ideologies are put to rout

at equinox and solstice. So we neither
despair nor glory in the change of weather.

This state of things should discipline our zeal;
all policies will one day face repeal,

all present institutions cede their powers
eventually to circumstance and hours.

Upon this spinning earth, we will not find
a government to permanently bind.

For as with seasons, with affairs of men
what goes around will come around again.

--Duane K. Caylor