City on a High Hill

City on a High Hill
 

So many people, always so many. The tourists looking up, looking lost, looking excited, looking tired. The street performers ready to amuse for pocket change, the derelict not caring to amuse, only for pocket change. The ambitious, the stressed annoyed - inconvenienced by the tourists, oblivious to the performers, disgusted by the derelict. The police, what’re they? Not tourists. Not locals. From Springfield, McLean, Tyson’s, bedroom communities, guarding the city on the hill. The monuments, glorious monuments to what can be, what could be, what should be – what isn’t. But the ideal is – it still is. Graves of heroes, of unknown, their silent dangerous sentinel. The lesser monuments, the hidden ones, the tourists won’t see – Einstein hidden in the Elms, the Prophet of the Long Road, the Vietnam angels of mercy. Museums, luxury, motorcades, squalor, sirens, pigeons, the Potomac. Cherry Blossoms. Four corners: Lincoln, Jefferson, the White House, Capitol Hill, at the center Washington. Power, promise, progress, despair, deceit, decay - hope.

And oh to see it by night! When the sin and corruption cannot be seen. Only the white lights, on the white city, on the high hill - the beacon. The ideal.

© 2015 Joseph E. Fountain