we would know our greatest threat is not some errant warhead punted from the ocean, not a suitcase full of plutonium falling into the wrong hands (which is any hand but ours), not even a germ hacked free of the Amazon by capitalist loggers then blamed on San Francisco homosexuals, but instead, the primordial glow of the new mother openly nursing on a bench in Lantern Park, tipping herself like a pagan chalice into a mouth that never says thank you.
If she believed what her leaders say, she would know — this freckled mother with hair like solar prominence — that God is not inside her and all around her like the first Christians thought, but beyond, like an angry bearded whale who transcends all matter but his own. Or else God is the prototypical American who hath granted unto her alabaster skin and a mind like empty Tupperware, a dolly-heart kept fresh under tight folds of Glad Wrap. But she does not believe. Her child coughs, nestled within folds of chartreused wool.
Tonight, a million husbands will follow the New York Times best-seller list toward neo-messiahs who grin like Hannibal on blood-spangled paper jackets, toward Lady Justice brandishing what we thought was a John Wayne cavalry saber, but has since become a scimitar — so bright with day's decline that even mothers forget the mastectomy scars. Please remember: under the blindfold, those eyes are made of stone. And if the sunburnt priests of Babel could see us now, even they would turn away, shaking their unwashed heads.