Red Flag

A new poem

Red Flag

The real sky should look so good,
cloudless, stars on night’s blue where
the sun’s rays haven’t reached.

It’s dawn they say, a darkness
defeated. But what if we see it upside
down, backwards, inverted,

inside out? What if we hung it
as though the perfect world it sketches
into logo were in fact

at sunset instead? What if we
implied the red glare has always been
dusk creeping in? Soon,

when it unfurls, we’ll see neither
morn nor eve, just a blood-soaked cloth
too wet to mop anything up.

.

-George Murray