Ghosts and Flapjacked Graves

T'was with a vague sense of unease
I walked surrounded by what seemed
Eddies of unrest
Where once peace had been
Exposed upon the air
Like an image captured on film.
A half-heard, half-felt murmur -- a tremor
From deep below my wavering footsteps
Accompanied a brief bright moment
That cleared the mist and cobwebs
So familiar a sight
Along my inner path.
A man in a white suit and shoestring tie
Approached me purposefully,
Apparently on some somewhat urgent mission --
Which, of course, distressed me;
For I presumed I could be
Of little help, if any.
As he drew near, his bushy mustache
Drooped curtain mid-rise over scowling lips,
I recognized him.
My hero, Mark Twain.
Sam . . . Mr. Clemens, I stammered.
You must help me, he said.
How can I possibly help you? You are,
After all, long dead. Why, in fact and pray tell,
Rest you not?
Who could rest? he said.
Do you not feel the rumble?
Hear you not the roar?
Did you think it merely a tectonic shift of some sort?
Well, it isn't. It's the tossing and turning of men in their graves:
Men dead long before I died,
Men who built this country, men who wrote your Constitution,
Men who are awakened outraged and overwhelmed with grief
By some fool who would rewrite that Constitution
In the King James Version
Or more or less, or worse.
Now their clamor, their gnashing, their roar and growl
Have stirred me from my long sleeping voyage,
Rocking my raft to a most distressing degree.
It is enough, I tell you, to cause a famously honest man
To lose his celebrated sense of humor.
And as if
That were not
More than enough,
They tell me that
They call that fool "Huck."