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Mary and James Hanna are writers who live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Mary C. Hanna
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James E. Hanna
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The Exile

Prologue

There is ever a moment, a tremor in time,
When an arrogance suffers a sparser decline,
When a vanity slips and is no longer host
To the banal influence of statelier ghosts.
There is ever a time when a suitor must stare
Upon gaunt apparitions too vague to declare.
There is ever a pause when a folly is tamed
Of its stubborn aversion to spirits unnamed.

Be it said in defense of the thing we survived
That this tenuous moment was slow to arrive,
That our sight did not fail nor our innocence pale
Till our spell had endured an inordinate time.
It is more than a tribute, a token to form,
That this fated dissolve should have taken so long.

We are not unconsoled though our hour has waned.
Such a shock cannot quickly return once again,
And it's easy to hope that no energy come
To a poem that would nurture so vapid a flame.
But the wish that its embers be neatly contained
Is a prank also born of imperious whims
And so smug a regard is too slight an award
For the numbers unblessed by this withering turn.
In their shadowy loss there is license enough
To recall at least part of the thing we have spurned.

In the final few months of that undeclared fray,
When that fitful resolve was no longer delayed,
There was born an impoverished and little-known law
That was sadly a part of the will to withdraw.
It was simply pronounced that those men on their own,
Who had somewhat preceded the call to abscond,
Would be slightly redeemed for the thing they'd foreseen
And afforded the option to also return. ...
It was theirs to be part of a grander retreat
If they grudgingly honored their military debt.
It was theirs to return if they opted to serve
Among ranks whose despondence seemed better deserved.

It's a comment indeed upon spurious plans
That so few were disposed to consider such terms,
That so few were enticed to be swayed by the price
Of a limbo no finer than that of their own.
It's a fitting result that no concord was formed,
That those early resisters remained on their own,
That the country's lame goal of retrieving their souls
Was a bid that was rarely considered at all. ...
It was surely no more than an unwitting mime
That an insular dreamer was back at this time,
But his chaos must do. Were it not for his toll
It is doubtful this pledge could be written at all.