by Jennifer M Phillips
Time to step back from your long labors, Joe,
and let the eager young ones try their hands.
You've kept the long watch safe all night, we know,
and spared the ship of state from bergs and sands.
Heed the prophet's words, predicting, at his finish,
"another will increase, and I must diminish."
Your whole career you've served the working jack,
walked the union picket-line, yanked foreign jobs home,
foreseen future industries, retooled the work,
and understood such tasks are never done.
How it pains the industrious will to step away
before well-laid plans arrive at light of day.
It goes against your conscientious grain
to leave unfinished what's urgently needed
for this time of tempestuous fire and intemperate rain,
but the ground is prepared and a good harvest seeded.
Trust our resilient future, its competent folk,
to find new pathways for new repairing work.
You've fought for justice, remedy, and franchise
on an uphill slope and seen strong weapons shattered,
and though, as always, demons and enemies rise,
you've braced to hold the line when it has mattered.
Now there is a rank of fresh supply behind.
Fall back with honor. Trust the guiding Mind.
Democracy feels a fragile edifice
that monks must sweep away when prayers are done
like a painting in sand that time and wind erase.
One God-breathed moment: hearts are not the same.
See: the fresh art commences, the template resurrects;
renewed hope finds voice, as the Spirit directs.
O world-sorrow always with us, wars that never end,
but flurry like grackle flocks from one tree to another;
Many losses borne; retirement's one more to mend.
Your back is strong, your loves close by, your team calls you brother.
you've led us by your best lights, and now will lead in this.
Believe that a gallant soul is never purposeless.
Jennifer M Phillips is a bi-national immigrant, painter, Bonsai-grower, with two chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (Blurb, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022). Phillips' work has appeared in over 100 journals, and is currently twice-nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize.
