Second Coming No. 206 — August 13, 2025
A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by Donald Trump and his fascist regime
T. H. M. Gellar-Goad
Adrift
—after Catullus (poem 4)
Consider a boat, a
fast one.
Faster than a boast.
Regales you with tales
of regattas long gone,
races won by rowers worn, or
by sail spread greedily to the
wind.
Imagine the geography of your
world. The threats to shipping,
the quaint ports of call,
freight lanes and ferry lines,
middle passages,
the Bermuda Triangle and Panama
Canal of our times.
Our boat — and it is no
boat — boasts dominion
over it all. This
boat that used to be all forest,
wind whipping through its fir,
until the hatchet-men came.
You might say its maiden
voyage was auspicious. You might
say its maiden voyage spelled all
the rough seas that followed. You
might think this a hackneyed
metaphor, a cliché older than
the boat, older
than the boat poet.
But since the beginning, and since
the second beginning, the boat
has braved waves and tides
and currents, with swings to the left and,
inevitably, to the right.
Only too recently did we think
this boat
was sailing straight ahead, smooth for
shore, clear bearings, clear
waters, clear skies.
But that all feels like a lifetime ago. Now, this boat’s
hard to
find. It’s grown senile,
atrophied like so much that
goes unexercised. All it lives for now
is to punch
and counterpunch.
T. H. M. Gellar-Goad is Professor of Classics and Denton Fellow at Wake Forest University. He has published six scholarly books: Plautus: Epidicus (Bloomsbury, 2025), Masks (Punctum Books, 2024), A Commentary on Plautus’ Curculio (University of Michigan Press, 2024), Plautus: Curculio (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), and Laughing Atoms, Laughing Matter: Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and Satire (University of Michigan Press, 2020). With Christopher B. Polt, he edited the essay collection Didactic Literature in the Roman World (Routledge, 2023). His poetry has appeared in Arion, The Classical Outlook, and Windhover.
Second Coming is a publication of Indolent Books, a haven for poets over 50 without a first book and a welcoming space for women, people of color, queer and trans writers, and others who do not fit molds or conform to expectations.
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Love this.