Once liberty bells
as huge and everlasting
as the sort their great
grandfathers and their commanding
officers intended
finally got swinging
hard enough and went
peeling out blind
from the amber waves to the seashores
in all four directions
the freedom they unleashed
was so complete, the
new spaces created by their resonant pressure
were so perfectly empty, so ubiquitous
that no child
who came along nine months later
could even tell the difference.
They grew up confused
about who wrote which protest songs,
forgot the significance
of the betta fish brooding
alone in his undetectable tank water—
and later, one or two
even scolded their own toddler
for not understanding
that they way
she construes the fish's
world is all wrong
and that those special corrective
lenses they bought her
to help her see it better
cost well over three hundred dollars.
