It is Getting Hard to Breathe, America

                                                    ---Jared Smith

by George Drew
 

I was born in the middle of the second
    great war almost in the middle
          of the greatest scientific century,

and because I sit here a few years
    into another of consequence looking
          back at the suddenly shrunken one

I was born into, how strange it is
    to be re-viewing it: Like an ocean
          it recedes ever farther, falling

backwards into the gray swells of time.

How strange to talk about the middle
    of a century here just past
          the perimeter of two of them—

that century my cradle, this one my crypt.

A Note About the Author: George Drew is the author of The View from Jackass Hill, 2010 winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, Texas Review Press, which also published Down & Dirty (2015), and his New & Selected, Pastoral Habits, in 2016. His seventh collection, Fancy’s Orphan, is due out in January, 2017, from Tiger Bark Press. He is the winner of the 2014 St. Petersburg Review poetry contest