Once Enemies

[matsunosuperfan]

Once Enemies


Today the Knight of Doleful Countenance
would not assault our giants in the sky– 
those monstrous dandelions whose white arms
of balsa-wood moan deeply as they turn
and often break away, or crash and burn.

He of La Mancha, rather, would respect
today’s gaunt windmills’ dated loyalty -
like his to tarnished codes of chivalry -
in still contending with the giant Warming
whose fraudulence collapsed and blew away.

I picture him and bony Rosinante
posed with a giant pinwheel, skeletal,
whose day, like theirs, is done while what remains
recalls old loves, arms bravely raised, campaigns
which, long betrayed, still honor lost ideals.

They try so hard one’s soul must sympathize
with wasted effort, industry, good heart
expended in their quest to save a world
which doesn’t need their rescue, or their part:
pawns moved by folly, tragic from the start.

More than solid work with rhyme and meter; well done. I find the content mostly somewhere between mildly interesting and boring, probably because the poem quickly becomes repetitive/fails to deliver on its promise of taking these characters someplace new. Things peak for me in the first stanza, where the dandelion metaphor is deftly executed and a whole world of thematic possibility seems to have opened for our exploration. The subsequent stanzas shut this door. Instead of having the kind of allusive adventure I was hoping for, we kind of plod through what I can't help but receiving as a rather dour disquisition on familiar themes of industrial excess, the fundamental waste and decay of modernity, and more than a whiff of ideological nostalgia. The parts that most directly expound on these themes - the last lines of S2 and S3 - were the most difficult for me to engage with / suspend my disbelief about. 

Some light cruft here and there to flag: "He of La Mancha, rather," is a lot of syllables to reestablish who our protagonist is. "whose day... lost ideals" is a bit of a mouthful to read aloud. 

I kinda dig "a world [that] doesn't need their rescue, or their part" but rhyming with/ending on "from the start" gets a groan out of me. Ditto "pawns by folly" which combines cliche with affected archness - that's a no from me, dogg!