The Middle Ages

Kirk Wilson

In the Middle Ages people went looking for the center of things

Sometimes it seemed they could almost see it

Sometimes it came at them from a crazy angle and it scared them

They made a fiction of the past and always woke up in the future

They were ashamed that not much had happened for them since Adam and Eve got evicted

They felt late for something

and couldn’t get over how much they didn’t know

They had been the sweetest babies once and learned the language

But God owned all the quiet spots so they never learned the silence

They had visions but didn’t see the data centers and the ICE raids coming

The voices they heard in the air were not in the language they had learned

They felt like they were being followed


what surprised you about the composition of this poem?

The form of this poem took me by surprise because it came along with a developing sequence that wanted short lines and verses interconnected to address the political moment. When the ICE raids showed up among a bunch of free-roaming lines in an unexpected journey to the Middle Ages, I was reminded that no moment stands alone. We may be shocked and terrified and, please, moved to action by the turns in our own story, but people have been here before.

Kirk Wilson is the author of the poetry collection Songbox, the chapbook The Early Word, the story collection Out of Season, and Unsolved, a nonfiction crime study. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, New England Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and other journals and anthologies.
Originally published:
January 28, 2026

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