Our Castle of Blown Glass.

We were the lucky generation -
or might have been
had we been stewards of the things we had,
not taken them for granted.

We lived the life and thought the thought,
whatever thought was a la mode,
whatever brought us Kudos by the K.
Freemen of the Castle of blown glass,
we counted ourselves Bless'd.

Would we sit to write a song? It wrote itself.
If we were hungry, fruit fell from the trees.
In every way and every day
life was ever sweet.

And in the glass walls we could see
the beauty that was us, the way society
takes nature by the scruff.
And through the walls another grace --
Nature the provider, ever offering the teat
and there for ever at our beck and call.

Elsewhere than here -- perhaps, we thought,
where the footings stood
on the long sleep of the long departed --
fissures ran, the famous glass had clouded.
We searched hard for the flaw,

distraught to think we could not see
what was before our eyes. Outsiders,
hungry near to death. Long columns of them.
Displaced and dispossessed...
We did not see them make their way
to a new and denser darkness
that we had never seen.

We were seduced by feelings of eternity;
the permanence of life. It was not so.
The fault lines ran through us, and only then
through that which bore our name.
We had the eyes that dim when strangers starve.
What use to us were walls of glass?
They saw no more, we saw no more,
than through a wall of brass.

Written For Mary's prompt The Castle of Glass at Poetry Jam.