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As Above

A cycle repeats

These whose trespass by dreaming to build a sky wide enough to hold up time and daughters in the sun press sides and backs together to make trees of a common reach. For water, for their sons, as the sun goes dark. Not to be moved, they are plowed, knocked down, shot, and mocked; they bleed from the sides of them, but the rhizome threads reveal themselves now a vast below, to hold. Here is the same sky that turned dark when guards at the first turning murdered the liberator for trespass of healing touch, for refusal to stone them, for exiling none but the moneychangers in the temple, whose blood fell and still falls into this earth, who told the woman on the road of sorrows to save their tears for the children––who are these, dusty feet in the earth seeded with the rising dead pressing hands into the wound of an ancient promise.

Building Nests

Against the rest of it

Hang on, I tell the children. There is a place beyond this, and you get there by going in––deeper, not away. I want them to know this. I want to know this. I want to stop everything and hold each other and share whatever anybody has of food and music while the animals slide between our legs, onto our laps, our shoulders, mewing, barking, cooing in chaotic chorus until sleep.

Meanwhile, I collect the history of this––place? Time? Us? ––I don’t know which, twig by fallen twig, torn fabric scraps, dropped feathers from their wings, these pieces everywhere.

Then I catch myself doing it again, in response to the next news of the macabre. I think, no, that won’t go through, and they won’t do it, although I know better. That refusals like these work as lubricant against the gears, that refusals like these say proceed to the machine, with a sigh where a scream should be.

But I cannot spend all day screaming while there are still-living children here with me. I want them to go on living. I say, today we are making nests. Today, let’s gather what we can find. All the broken bits will do. 

And when they say for what? I say, because Look, a nest is beautiful! And for the babies!

They go. We go off looking together. I wave them on ahead with a smile, and when they are out of sight, it’s time to weep.

On a Feast Day

In remembrance

they banish the cameras to do this the news goes dark the news cuts to the shining hall of shining faces beneath the rockets red glare what unholy betrothal of lust and war begat this moment when the lens of the hour

is a gunner’s sight aimed at the child in the rubble of a former home who dares to call after a missing friend, come out come out wherever you are the bombs bursting in air what truth is this what night their eyes the children

have cousins who from the opulent lawns on the other side before the chancellors of progress scream because they still have breath to give and they fly it to the upper reaches of the towers to interrupt a runaway feast

breaking news their cry the news goes dark quick mute the drums mute the mouths easy their crime to dare protection of these least their trespass their refusal to wait until the tanks circle back the temple veil splits o god they call why––

and the names of the next murdered child to see in those faces themselves to hold to those towers a mirror long enough to heat some other flame above those unhearing talking heads they call those names

the living script for a new chorus, defiant wings against the winding updraft of this heat, eyes on the ground, on the babies the lift of them the song the theft they are skinny they call wide-eyed in the night until they stop

the tanks roll
the bombs continue
the children are in pieces now
the children are beaten
for disrupting the peace
more come

singing

The Answer

To the winning strategy

A cry like that final cry is music for everafters to dwell inside, but who hears? Above the commerce of killing in the name of ending death, only the closest to its edge. Those condemned to death see clearly, trust in water, for a body owning nothing can never be owned, and give it all away with an abundance that terrifies whomever thought themselves a step above now tawdry with pretense in a cardboard crown, another clowned owner of that endlessly elusive all.

***

Inspired by Mahmoud Darwish’s I Have the Wisdom of One Condemned To Death

Psychosis

Of civilizations

Under pretense of we a community is founded as defense against an unspoken fear, and that horror is transferred to the abject other, now negated––not people, but the walking dead.

Where those ties might bind you get knotted pathologies instead, twisted clusters of defensive narcissisms woven into founding myths. Birth of a nation. The flags of fathers. The fathers dead, now get the children. Act fast.

What compulsion. Repeat, loop, repeat. A regression to psychotic repression defined by disconnection from reality.

With each return of this plague, the hold on the symbols that held us slips away and the virus turns inward, consuming its host.

We remember. But. What is memory? One asks and soon forgets again, each verse of a poem emerging from the fertile black lines it erases rising anyway to sing from beneath the feet of us gathered at the burial grounds, of this what of those we never––did

what we
would
not––
yet

***

Informed by the work of Noelle McAfee

The Precarities

Attached to trees

Caterpillar, rest. This is a blinking of the lights, a look beneath the hood of this machine beneath the metal sheen made to mask both barbarism and the wound within the hour of a common cry against its edge. After so long looking, eat the leaves of this knowing tree, spin a temporary shroud to wrap you tight against the ripening of your untried wings, their still untested flight. Behind them, may you sleep once fully through a night.