Max Reif’s most recent poem to appear here was “Domestic Revelation” (December 2018). 

With Trump, It’s Come to This
By Max Reif

When the President’s mind
is a maelstrom, an abyss,
a sinkhole into which
he seems to be drawing
the whole world,
what do you do?

A mighty battle
is taking shape—
law and honor against
the undisciplined, lashing winds
from the cyclonic entity behind
that cruel face,

who came out of what
series of past lives
to amass such amoral power?

I could call him antichrist,
but he gives that word
a bad name.
Such a one would not be
so trivial, so shallow,
for God’s sake, would he?

What do the nation
and world do
except apply
all available strength

and then trust
that something is dragging us
to the brink for reasons
we may not know

but that,
as England stood alone
in a dark time not
so long ago,

we too, standing now
in the face of this
brutal whirlwind,