A Sylum

Ode on a Neighboring Power

Thou dimple-cheeked giant, swelled with plight,

Whose shadow stretches o’er our sovereign ground,

Historian of intent, unhousebroken homewrecker,

Border-watching family guard turned hound:

What fell ambition drives Mordor’s gaze?

What territorial hunger set ablaze?

Once a-sylon — was thy claim,

That others might flee a desperate hour.

Now thou would’st seize what never bore thy name,

Forgetting what asylum means in power.

Is not a nation’s boundary sacred?

Where seizure has no dwelling place?

What delusion feeds thy dementia?

What madness whisper’d, what maimed mentality?

What fevered fiction traverses thy vein now?

One phantom windmill to a million daisy?

Heard reasons are but true, those unconfessed

Are lazier still — darkness, ambition’s cyanide pill.

Our boundaries gird, like oceans on lines,

Defining the shape of both nation and law;

While thy minds writhe into madness, crossing,

With crosses like a mind eaten raw.

An asylum for such unfortunates there ought to be,

Where the dangerously deluded can’t run free.

When history shall this aggression judge,

Thou shalt be reminded of this shame,

A power that would not its enemies budge,

With an ally sought to play a game.

“I am refuge to no man,” thy actions state,

“But one who would all good fellowship negate.”