What Rough Beast | Covid-19 Edition | 04 23 20 | Robert René Galván

Robert René Galván
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

—after Goya

Ignorance awoke
in a storm
of witless starlings,
blackened the sky
with dread,
minions led
like the bull
who follows red
to his own demise;
faint assurances,
enormous walls
cannot quell
the plague,
or the machinations
of the slaughterhouse;
caged migrations
and tent cities
in the desert;
old resentments
channeled
into amnesia,
diversions –
throngs mesmerized
by the looking glass
light
walk the streets
like the undead
while the world
bastes
in its own
detritus,
but crisis
forces change,
a dim lamp grows
on the horizon,
the turning
of night
into a sky
of blue.

Robert René Galván is the author of Meteors (Lux Nova Editions, 1997). His poetry has appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Azahares Literary Magazine, Gyroscope, Hawaii Review, Newtown Review, Panoply, Stillwater Review, West Texas Literary Review, and UU World, as well as in the anthologies Undeniable: Writers Respond to Climate Change (Alternating Current, 2020) and Puro ChicanX Writers of the 21st Century (forthcoming from Cutthroat and Black Earth Institute).

born in San Antonio, resides in New York City where he works as a professional musician and poet.

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