A Multi-part Poem of History, Neighborliness, and Vigilance.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. - William Faulkner
Every long poem needs time to gather its breath.
This one begins on an ordinary morning, the kind we forget as soon as it passes, yet these are the mornings that shape us most.
Preface
This work began on an ordinary porch in upstate New York on a cool, late-fall morning when I sat with William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich open across my knees while the neighborhood carried on with its small, unassuming rituals. The first car warming down the block. A rake clearing a path no one else noticed. A neighbor’s dog tugging at a leash with a kind of early-morning purpose.
Somewhere between Shirer’s stark recounting of catastrophe and the soft familiarity of our little corner lot, I felt an unexpected confluence: history, present, and the small civic gestures that keep the world from slipping.
This poem is not a warning, though it pays attention to danger. It is not nostalgia, though it dwells in memory.
It is, instead, an act of looking closely; at the past, at the world outside the porch screens, and at how easily societies drift toward mercy or toward menace.
History is vast. Lives are small.
This poem explores the fragile space where the two converge.
All large histories begin in an ordinary moment.
So does this one...on a porch, in late fall, with a book heavy on the knees and the neighborhood slowly waking.
I. Morning on Boulevard and Street
The trash truck comes first...
backing up with that resigned beeping
like a stubborn metronome.
The driver lifts two fingers from the wheel
as he passes,
a gesture somewhere between greeting
and habit.
Across the way, Mrs. Hernandez
is already coaxing her geraniums
into the weak November sun.
She talks to them in two languages,
as if either one
might persuade them to keep going
a little longer.
The mail carrier walks his practiced line -
hood up, head down,
yet still he nods when he sees me,
as if he’s signing off on the fact
that I am still here.
These are the people
who hold the street together:
the ones whose names we know
and those we only recognize
by the shapes of their mornings.
Inside, Shirer waits on the table,
the great weight of his pages
patient as stone.
I pour coffee,
watch the steam
rise and vanish,
and think how easily
whole worlds disappear
without anyone noticing
until it’s far too late.
II. History in the Kitchen
The kettle whistles;
the book whispers.
“In the beginning,” Shirer says,
“it is always gradual.”
The pop-tart snaps in half,
sugar scattering like frost
on the plate.
Outside, a school bus
gathers its small cargo
of laughter and sleepiness.
Someone’s backpack thuds on the sidewalk.
A parent calls, “Don’t forget your lunch!”
“In the beginning,” history answers,
“they forget something else instead.”
I butter the toast,
smear jam like a bright wound,
and read about newspapers
that changed their tone
one cautious column at a time,
radio voices that grew sharper
while the people grew duller,
more tired,
more willing.
The Steady One rinses a mug,
says, “The neighbors asked
if we can watch their house next week.”
Of course we can.
We know the cat,
the porch light patterns,
the sound of their door.
Trust is a small thing
until you have to live without it.
“In those days,” Shirer writes,
“most people assumed
it could never happen here.”
I close the book for a moment,
feel the weight of it
against the table,
and listen to the refrigerator hum...
the banal, stubborn music
of a life still intact.
III. Yard Signs
By summer
the lawns have learned
a new vocabulary.
Some say
VOTE.
Some say
HATE HAS NO HOME HERE.
Some say nothing,
just dandelions and a hose
coiled like a sleeping question.
One sign down the street
is angrier,
all red words and exclamation points.
It shouts at passing cars
in a font designed for outrage.
I pass it with Charlie
on our evening walks.
He doesn’t care about fonts.
He’s only interested in squirrels
and the faint ledger of scent
left by last night’s rain.
But I read it,
I always read it.
Words do not stop working on us
just because we pretend
we’re not paying attention.
“In every age,”
Shirer reminds me
when I come back to the porch,
“there are those who profit
from our fear
of one another.”
The neighbor who owns the sign
waves at me from his truck.
He once helped push a stranger’s car
out of a snowbank
between Boulevard and Mountain.
We both stood there, breath steaming,
hands numb,
laughing at the way ice
turns every rescue into a slapstick scene.
I think of that
when I read his sign.
I hold both truths together
the way I hold the book and the beagle -
carefully,
knowing they both have teeth.
The middle of this poem is a hinge, where reflection deepens and the world outside becomes inseparable from the world within. The porch becomes both a literal place and a lens for understanding how ordinary people guard (or surrender) their freedoms.
IV. Porch Theology
By late afternoon,
the street grows thoughtful.
Leaves make their slow descent
past the powerlines,
each one a small experiment
in letting go.
I sit on the porch
with the book open,
pen in hand,
underlining phrases
like a parishioner
marking a psalm.
“In the final analysis,”
Shirer says,
“it was less a story of conquest
than of surrender.”
Across the street,
Mr. Collins drags his grill
back into the garage.
He waves,
asks if we need anything
from the hardware store.
I say no,
but thank you,
and mean both.
Above us,
the sky decides
whether to keep the light
or pass it on.
I think of all the people
who once believed
they were only minding their own business
while the ground shifted
under their feet.
Porch theology is simple:
goodness is made
from small offers:
can I carry that,
are you okay,
did you hear
what’s happening?
God, if He is listening,
must have a particular fondness
for the ones who knock
on a neighbor’s door
just to make sure
the quiet inside
is not the wrong kind.
V. When the News Comes
Some evenings,
history is not in the book
but in the push alert.
A headline flashes
across the phone -
a march,
a violent gathering,
a crowd chanting
words that should have died
with the last century’s smoke.
Charlie looks up,
sensing the stiffening
in my breath.
The Steady One frowns,
leans over my shoulder.
The photos all look the same now:
faces lit by anger,
arms raised,
flags repurposed
as weapons and threats.
“In this way,”
Shirer’s quiet voice
returns from the table,
“they made fear
a habit.”
We sit for a moment
in the heavy air
between disbelief
and recognition.
Then the neighbor’s kid
comes by selling
raffle tickets for the band trip.
We sign the form,
swap a joke about his trumpet,
and wish him luck.
It feels too small,
too soft,
against the hard shape
of that headline.
But history is built
from the bricks at hand.
We stack what we can:
kindness here,
clarity there,
a refusal to laugh
at the wrong things.
VI. Vigil
Night comes down
like a long decision.
The porch light clicks on.
Somewhere a television
flashes blue in a window -
laughter track,
then breaking news,
then a commercial promising
everything will be fine
if we just buy
the right detergent.
“In their living rooms,”
Shirer notes,
“they were often more occupied
with comfort
than with consequence.”
I don’t want to be
that kind of reader
of my own time.
So I sit.
I listen.
I let the discomfort stay.
A siren wails
on a distant road,
rises,
falls,
disappears.
Crickets take over
the evening shift.
The neighbor’s porch light flicks on.
Someone laughs two houses down -
a small eruption of joy
in the dark.
Vigil, I’m learning,
does not mean
never sleeping.
It means
not sleeping through
what matters.
It means
remembering what you’ve read
when you fold the book shut,
and carrying it out
to the compost bin,
the mailbox,
the voting booth,
the awkward conversation at work.
It means
praying with your eyes open,
even if you don’t use
that word for it.
All long histories return to where they began.
By the final section, the street is unchanged, but the reader, like the speaker, carries a new kind of seeing.
This closing movement is not a resolution but a posture: awake, watchful, neighborly.
VII. The Street, Again
Morning returns
as if nothing happened.
The trash truck,
the geraniums,
the dog on his leash,
the mail carried
door to door.
History does not announce itself
with trumpets.
It arrives in routines,
in what we choose
to ignore.
The book still waits
on the table,
its heavy spine like a warning
and a promise.
I take Charlie out.
He sniffs the base of the maple,
investigates yesterday’s leaf pile
as though it were a new continent.
Across the road,
the neighbor with the loud sign
is scraping ice off his windshield.
He looks cold,
a little older in the morning light.
I raise a hand.
He raises his.
For a brief moment,
we are simply two people
on the same street,
under the same sky,
trying to get the day started.
This is not enough
to repair the world.
But it is not nothing.
And as long as the book is open,
as long as the leaves still fall,
as long as we keep
watching,
speaking,
showing up...
history will have to contend
not only with our failures
but with our stubborn,
ordinary,
ongoing
care.
The page closes, but the questions stay open.
What we learn in the quiet often lasts longer than the lessons forced upon us.
Notes & Commentary
On Reading Shirer in a Domestic Setting
The poem places William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich not in an academic study or a library, but on a lived-in porch with iced tea, Pop-Tarts, and the slow choreography of an ordinary neighborhood. This juxtaposition is intentional. It echoes a crucial reality of democratic decline: authoritarian transformations rarely happen in extraordinary places; they happen while people are living their everyday lives.
By situating Shirer’s warnings amid the rhythms of a quiet American street, the poem asks the reader to recognize that history is not a distant landscape. It is the daily air we breathe - even when nothing appears to be happening.
On “Small Joys” and Moral Attention
Throughout the poem, sensory details—oak leaves, the soft sigh of bread, the scrape of a rake, counterbalance the heavy subject matter. These are not distractions; they are acts of witness. Philosophers from Simone Weil to Wendell Berry argue that attentiveness to the small is a first step toward ethical life.
Here, noticing becomes a kind of resistance.
In an age when passivity is a political commodity, the poem suggests that choosing to be awake to one’s world, its comfort and its danger, is not trivial, but vital.
Shirer and Gross in Parallel
Although Shirer documents the broad architecture of Nazi power, Jan Gross’s Neighbors examines what happens when that power seeps into the granular level of a single town. Shirer shows a nation seduced; Gross shows a community implicating itself.
Taken together, they form a devastating pair:
- one reveals how propaganda and fear can redirect a country,
- the other reveals how neighborliness can be eroded until it fractures into violence.
The poem’s quiet setting underscores this connection. What happens on a porch, a sidewalk, a familiar corner...these are the places where democracy is either tended or forgotten.
On the Poem’s Final Movement
The closing insistence that living is itself resistance, is not meant as a platitude. Rather, it echoes the work of moral philosophers who argue that ethical attention begins with how one inhabits the day. The poem concludes not with a call to grand action but with a reminder that vigilance is cultivated in the modest, repeating moments of life: reading, listening, reflecting, refusing to look away.
Why Fall?
The poem unfolds in late fall, a season of endings, reckonings, and cool clarity. It mirrors both the content of Shirer’s historical arc and the emotional timbre of communal memory. Autumn here is not only atmospheric but structural: an emblem of a society approaching the consequences of its earlier decisions.
"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution (Hannah Arendt). - A reminder that vigilance is perpetual, not episodic; that power always slips unless held accountable.
Author’s Note
This poem, and the framing material around it, grew out of the simplest of mornings. I was reading William Shirer on the porch, listening to the neighborhood make its small, familiar sounds: a car warming up, leaves scratching the walk, the steady breath of a house settling into late autumn. Nothing dramatic. Nothing historic.
And yet...there was a tension between that quiet and the world Shirer was describing, a world where ordinary people surrendered themselves, one inch at a time, to spectacle, deception, and fear. I found myself thinking about how history often enters not with fanfare, but with a nudge, a whisper, a change so subtle you hardly notice it until it’s everywhere.
Later, I reread Jan Gross’s Neighbors, and the two books seemed to speak to each other across the porch boards. Shirer shows how a nation can be seduced; Gross shows how a community can turn on itself. Both reminded me that vigilance is not the work of historians or politicians alone...it is the work of neighbors, porch-sitters, readers, people who watch carefully and care deeply.
This poem is my attempt to honor that idea:
that history lives not only in archives and monuments, but in the daily, human spaces where we decide, again and again, who we are, and what we will allow.
It is also a small testament to the power of attention. The pop-tart, the iced tea, the smell of wet leaves, the grain of the porch wood beneath my feet - all of that existed alongside the weight of Shirer’s words. The terrible and the tender overlapped in a way that felt true to the world we inhabit: fractured, beautiful, and always asking something of us.
If this poem has a single conviction, it is this:
Quiet is never just quiet.
It is either the quiet of complacency
or the quiet of those who are paying attention.
And I believe that noticing - really noticing -
is one of the last honest acts of hope we have.
The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us. - James Baldwin
2025
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