Preface To Gold: Fools & Their Gold

On returning to the Gold Standard, a free verse poem (as told to TS Eliot)

Oh Gold Standard like Icarus we abandoned you to the Greek skies!
Must we take up arms like Hamlet or even like Hamilton
Whose duel with Burr meant his end - of life but not legend?

Does the rose not bloom in the bloomiest of months?
April needs the rain's lifeblood like our own life needs its blood blood -
Like our nation (all nations) need Gold as its golden Standard.

There is a hat every sovereign nation once wore -
Dare to wear that hat again, the Hat Of Fiscal Decorum!
The plume is the plume of Wise Hammurabi, dreaming of fairness.

Did Joyce, walking the streets of Paris, daydream about you
O Gold Standard now buried perhaps in Père Lachaise next to Collette
Or Jim Morrison who - it is said - once consumed an entire bar of Gold.

To fervently want Gold returned as a Standard too long slandered
We need Miss Manners to rap our knuckles for digging in infertile dirt
Like swords beaten into plowshares unshared with a hungry world.

So we close our eyes like blind Homer but see a better time -
A time when we like great Croesus manhandling great Midas can laugh -
Saved! Once again, the Gold Standard is in love with us!