“Sic Semper Tyrannus” Poetry by Zachary Burd ’19

The following poem by Zachary Burd ’19 was inspired by the question: What is your greatest fear? Enjoy this amazing response.

Like clotting blood, the people gather,
Gazing down, with
Open, wide eyes.
A dreary day, but
The empyrean shrubs
Pay no heed.

The sky, with
Its curtains drawn,
Oozes a disciplined barbarity which
Covertly slices the ground in agony.

Some, unable to face
What lies below,
Enshrined with its
Wooden overcoat,
Avert their gaze,
Staring, looking, peering,
Hard and deep into
The forming puddles of rainwater.

They stare and stare,
Somehow thinking that
They will find
The answers to their questions in
The murky image
Reflected back to them.

But like a cracked mirror desired so,
A sliver of them is stolen
Each and every
Time they look.

A stony visage
Looks out,
Taking in the view
From behind the broken facade.

A landscape;
Marching legions of clouds
Wave their banners,
Proclaiming their quavering
Apprehensions of terror.
It smolders, unrelenting.

Yet the wails echo, relentlessly,
And the conscripted romance
Between the wind and plants
Makes a pariah of the benevolence
Of the slums, abysmal may they be.

But the plight of
The matrimony of mountains,
And the love affair of
The river and rocks,
Questions the fidelity to
Transform our dreams into truths.

It is the weak man that
Urges compromises,
Seeking mitigations.
But a martyr needs
A sword to fall on.

The grass,
Rising up like sentinels
Snapping to attention,
And the winds,
Slumped over,
Like fighters in their corners;
But the price of paradise is
Paid in blood.

A bug crawls up slowly,
Menacing in its
Pompous splendor.
Almost cadaverous,
Emaciated and gaunt
With its shrunken shell.

With a shrewd glance,
It surveys the mount.
Like an eviscerated painting,
Promiscuous protuberances
Jut out, overtly pervading,
Infused with seething
Cuts into the sky,
Like shards of rough metal.

A treacherous journey,
Perforated with pits and ditches.
Riddled with sinkholes,
A bullet-ridden body’s back
Trodden upon with
Delicate imprecision.

Looking up,
It beholds
The gathered onlookers.
Facetious, and ogling, as if
It was a dalliance,
They fade, mutedly.

Like patients being wheeled away
On stretchers, they
Evanesce, withering.
And like whispering souls, they
Vanish into the air.

And no one is there at all,
Not even the wind.
Just a lonely box
And spatterings of dying scrub.