Saturn, by Alexis Quinlan

Saturn Devouring His Son, by Francisco Goya (Spain) 1819

Saturn

It wasn't so hard to eat the children.
He was accustomed to grappling
with galactic dilemmas,
forcing knife-ish solutions.

His wife was against it. Duh.
It’s still hard not to like the guy
whose goatish rage for order still gambols us
onward like any progress, friendly and stupid.

Call him the first pissed-off pop to lock
his brats in the bedroom.
He was buying time, his signal gift,
a gift bigger than he. As gifts are.

They would dub his the Golden Age
which he'd predicted and molded
but didn't contemplate.
Even gods can’t quite imagine their ends.

Yet he was the bringer of ends
last planet in the reign of circles
conning us all to believe he’d tethered a world
built on blood and weather, on women.

Surely he sensed in the way we do
when the future pricks our goddish fingertips
how all things born of fear
loop round at last to kick our ass.

Alexis Quinlan

Alexis Quinlan is a writer, editor, reviewer, and adjunct English teacher in New York. Her poems can be found in The Paris Review and Denver Quarterly, online at Rhino, Tinderbox, and Juked, and via abchaospoesis.blogspot.com. More work coming soon on Diagram and Juked. Her recent review of Stephanie Strickland's How the Universe Is Made is on Heavy Feather Review. She is also a member of XR’s street theater group, Cit Ass Theater.