The passage of unseeing time has brought me to the place I knew was my inevitable destination. I am no longer able to see well enough to continue, and am therefore closing down Verse-afire with this, my last post, my favorite verse, or poem, as you will. You may decide for yourself which it is. The Passage Of The Dreams is autobiographical in a sense, the story, in verse, of a ten year old boy gazing skyward into a darkness ablaze with the brilliance of a billion stars. The blog was begun in May of 2009 and ends in October 2018. I thank all of my readers, and will always be appreciative of the comments. And so it is time to say goodbye. Or as we used to say in the neighborhood when we were kids, Ave atque vale.

Time is an illusion. Life is a cyclical event that begins and ends with youth.

THE PASSAGE OF THE DREAMS

The grass is cool on moon-dark summer nights
The backyard tree is black against the sky
The house asleep with but a few dim lights
And thoughts and dreams turn back to days gone by
To younger days when stars were still in reach
And star-filled dreams were easy to believe
The ten year old has much that he could teach
His older self if truth he’d but receive
The distant stars are near if you but find
The ten year old who once was lonely you
For travel to the stars takes but the mind
To take you there if you were only you
For time is but the passage of the dreams
The stars lent to that ten year old back then
That drifted with you down life’s winding streams
And now at age you dream of stars again

November elections the Republicans will retain the House and gain seats in the Senate. And the following day, after the votes are counted, comes the reckoning. President Trump will give Mueller 48 hours to produce evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to rig the 2016 election, and that will be the end of that, but not the end of Mueller’s problems since he will be a target of an investigation into the coup attempt to remove a lawfully elected president from office. Attorney General Jeff Sessions will be gone, and in his place an Attorney General who will clean out the Justice Department and the FBI, and appoint a Special Counsel or two to investigate and prosecute the ringleaders of the attempted coup. The names of the ringleaders will be no surprise, except perhaps for one very large name. In addition, the Clinton crime family will finally get a close up of a grand jury investigation into Hillary’s pay to play criminal activity while Secretary of State, as well as selling top secrets to our enemies by leaving highly classified material out in the open on a purposely unsecured server where the classified material could be read, for a price, in real time. The 2020 election cycle will be replete with pictures of Democrats being trundled off to jail. And all the King’s horses and all the King’s men will not even try to put the Democratic Party back together again.

Humpty Dumpty, pantsuit and all
Stole a great fortune but had a great fall
Comey and Mueller and Rosenstein, Strzok
Will find that their rooms have a door with a lock
Yes vengeance is sweet and the hammer will fall
On all of the Humptys who sat on the wall
To strike at a King you must see that he’s dead
For if he is not you will pay with your head
As all the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Will see that you never see sunlight again

At this writing it appears that Judge Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed for a seat on the United States Supreme Court, despite all the efforts of the Democrats and their willing liar, Christine Blasey Ford, to smear him with a false claim of rape when they were both in high school some thirty-six years ago. I spoke recently with my yet to be born great-great-grandson history professor, and asked him what happened at Ford’s theater. He looked at me quizzically and said, “There hasn’t been anything new since Stanton’s explosive correspondence with Booth was discovered some years ago.” I said, “Not that Ford’s theater, the Christine Blasey Ford’s theater.” “Ah, that,” he said. “That one is still talked about. There was an actual physical assassination in the first for political reasons, and an actual character assassination in the second, also for political reasons. It was ultimately shown that Senators Schumer and Feinstein had searched for many months for an accuser to come forward and destroy whomever President Trump nominated, who turned out to be Judge Kavanaugh. A woman named Ford was chosen and the plan was set in motion, at a time to obtain maximum effect. The effort failed but the Democrats trotted out other women who told their scripted lies to the Washington Post and the New York Times. It was all false, all a hit job, what the Democrats had been doing with every Republican Supreme Court nominee since Bork, and everyone knew it. The plot was ultimately unraveled and people went to jail, and Schumer and Feinstein were removed from the Senate, though many believed they should have been tried for treason or something. It finally ended, but it was great theater while it lasted.”

The theater beholds the play
The walls, the floor, the curtain
The actors, famous in their day
Know that one thing is certain
The play begins and then it ends
But always enters leftist
Is it a hit, well that depends
Who plays his role the deftest
The curtain falls, the stage goes dark
Due to exquisite timing
The losers go where dogs don’t bark
And Dems smile at the sliming
Bork was the first but not the last
Judge Thomas got his lynching
The GOP had held stern fast
With further seats now clinching
And so the future looms before
The New York Times will fool us
E Pluribus is now no more
But @MeToo won’t rule us

A recent study of all female termite colonies has shown that life can exist with only one gender, and radical feminism seems determined to bring this about by removing males from the process if not the planet, It is not clear that the sixties radical feminists had a fifty year plan to destroy the concept of gender and the science of biology, but that seems to be where we are heading. It began, innocently enough, with the demand that newspaper want ads stop listing jobs as male and female, arguing that jobs are neither male nor female and should not be listed as such. It seemed a small thing to most of us, and so it was done. From there the feminist agenda was enacted one salami slice at a time, until we reached the point where the very notion of male and female was scorned and ridiculed as just another humiliation imposed on society by the patriarchy. And so biology must go, since bi means two and everyone knows there is only one gender with 73 pronouns to illuminate the single gender’s unique differences. But what do we call that one gender? And what do the radical feminists call themselves? Certainly not feminists, though the few remaining masculinists among us may persist in calling them that. We do not yet know how this will all turn out, but we do know it will be whatever the feminists determine it will be, for their weapons are scorn and shame, and scorn and shame are lethal weapons to our current liberal male elites. But this is the optimistic view. Scorn and shame may not be enough. It is always possible they truly want to kill us.

To question the divinity
Of Abzug and Friedan
Was not within the power of
Your average mortal man
To do so was to cause all of
The left to be inflamed
And subject you to the torment
Of being scorned and shamed
And so their message gathered steam
And now that’s where we are
Some seven decades later and
We find we’ve come too far
To turn the clock of progress back
To times when men were men
And woman was the reason why
We fell in love, but then
The times have changed it seems for good
And always men are blamed
For masculine obsessions and
Forever scorned and shamed
It turns out genders are passé
We’re one under the skin
With male and female a construct
Not different, just kin
Yet while the women still insist
Male privilege be named
We still must call them ladies or
We’ll be both scorned and shamed
Yes that will do for now, they smile
As wine glasses they fill
To drink a toast to all  us males
Inside the termite hill

Today’s problems, massive seeming as they are to us, will, in time, be as shadows on the restless, shifting sand. Listening to Susan Wise Bauer’s magisterial three volume history of man from earliest myths to the renaissance, I became aware, not for the first time, that everything in the past is like blue shadows dimly seen on an erratically flickering screen. Valentinian’s problems with the Goths in the West and Valens’s sudden and unexpected encounter with the fiercest fighters to enter Europe from the vastness of the endless plains of Central Asia, the Huns, merits a short line or two. The Goths and the Huns are but dim blue shadows against the background of history, as are Valentinian and Valens. And as are we. The world we live in would have been unimaginable to Valentinian, let alone to the Huns, and as the world of a thousand years hence is unimaginable to us, where we too will be as flickering shadows, dimly seen against relentless time.

The Prince, back to the rising dawn
Sees shadow distant stretch
But at the setting, shadow gone
No longer Prince, but wretch
The King, his shadow mighty cast
Encircling the Earth
Will see his shadow dim at last
And circle to his birth
Blue shadows on a flick’ring screen
Erratic motions cease
The instant caster leaves the scene
And enters final peace
And so to all, if King or Prince
Blue shadows tell the tale
Of truth well told before and since
Blue shadow’s not for sale
Not to the Prince or mighty King
To order to expand
For shadows will, like everything
Die in the restless sand