Branding Branders and Epitaph

By Tom Merrill

Featured in New Lyre Magazine - Fall 2024

Branding Branders

Is there anything more to life-creation
than mechanistic murder?

Consider anyone’s darling,
some steamy union’s hapless fruit

that plumpened until it was time to be pushed
out into Adam’s lost Eden,

a punitive state of perpetual peril
where every arrival is left in the lurch

and the ultimate prospect is soil enrichment
and embedment beneath tended turf.

If guilt is assuaged by supposing your loves
are bound for compensatory bliss

since anything less would be wrong,
overriding all proud celebrations of birth

a constant chorus of hopeless keenings
keeps bewailing new tributes to earth.

So whenever I hear they’re out fighting crime,
I recall what creation’s Creator said

about whom to finger first.