The End of History By Ellen Roberts Young

The End of History
 
Ed announces he’s just married Mayor Lindsay’s daughter,
they went across the street for a reception at the White House.
 
Decades ago he worked across from the White House,
stood on the balcony to watch Roosevelt’s funeral parade.
 
Some months back he told me he’d watched Kennedy’s parade
from that balcony, years I distinguish merging in his mind.
 
“You don’t believe me,” he says. Body confined, his mind
refuses to stay within, slips outside past-present-future.
 
Why should his reports not mingle past and future?
He knows he’s lost his wife, and needs another.

Ellen Roberts Young has two chapbooks with Finishing Line Press, Accidents (2004) and The Map of Longing (2009) and one book, Made and Remade, (WordTech Editions, 2014) as well as poems in a wide range of print and online journals.  She is a co-editor of Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders Journal based in Las Cruces, NM, and blogs at www.freethoughtandmetaphor.com.