And so it tolled.
Not rhythmic
Nor harmonic.
Glances at stained glass. A room accompanied by the sun.
He cried. We cried.
The sun went away yet the crying had stayed.
The doors are so welcoming. Yet I fear what comes inside. No longer home.
We looked at him all day. He’ll save us.
Yet he stood no place in our actions.
It arrived today. Our very last.
Resting in our hands, the final message.
We cried. He cried.
And so it tolled.
The sun never returned.
t was as if nothing had happened at all
there was neither a war nor an enemy
we were sitting by the seashore
under the shadows of the forest
in the middle of a field of petunias
You were kitting
and the kids were playing with the sand,
I was turning the pages of my memoir,
the wind was the only thing happening
and it ruffled the pages of my memoir
I returned to the past, long ago
neither you nor your knitting existed.
I was a kid and I played with a wooden sword
but ,you were not born to have a memory,
remembrance and so the kids
Just, the pages of my memoir turned with the wind
I took a gun and went to fight with an enemy
that did not exist and the war that did not happen at all
But, there, the sea was not calm
nor did any tree have a shadow
and as far as the eye could reach there was a desert
And the sad green flags that were fluttering
In the garden of red tulips
that stretched beyond the horizon
and it was as if nothing had happened at all.
The train is not delayed – I just wanted to sleep.
Beside me, a gentile dressed as a rabbi and this
morning, a rabbi as a gentile.
Of course – we are at war, so the firearms
are pregnant and a gang of halos in
camouflage sleep on one
station or another.
Bodies on top of bodies. Fully
clothed and writhing. One short americano,
freeze halfway to death and two large brown
army horses stare down at me. Everything
as intimate as if I were asleep. My own
costume, between my ears.
Peel a tangerine from holon and – with
sticky fingers, bum a cigarette off some
dangerous strangeness
on a wall.
In the muslim graveyard I finish
off my thinking. The loss of something
bothers me most, when I have lost
only part of it.
Where did you hide my passport?
crackers again. For dinner. Answers
inside an empty, shut fish moth.
I tiptoe,
gazing at the jars upon the table,
dull dried nuts, only the
lotus seeds, crawling with weevil bugs.
Grandma, in a distant room, her snores,
bypassing along her back.
I call for grandpa, and together we watch,
the hollow, writhing lotus seeds,
lifted in our hands,
in the midday sun.
They all lie down, in the winnow pan,
get weathered in the sun,
autumn-like, jolt at will.
Until we wake once more, step onto the balcony,
only to find the wind, having long swept them away,
leaving not even a lingering smell.
Clear lotus, their husks wailing with the fall leaves,
its bitterness drifted light in the air, once among trees,
crops, and lawns,
fluttering here and there,
and so silently sank to the ground.
Walking out in early evening,
I glance upward for no reason
and see their mark across the sky,
tracing a miles-long X
somewhere near 30,000 feet.
Just airliners, the normal traffic,
and if I take the time,
I can trace courses, one
south by southeast towards warmth,
the other north by northwest.
Sign, artifact in tiny crystals–
I remember that my father, the chemist,
my elder brother, so gifted,
the engineer, would try to explain
how heat from engines, moisture,
and air pressure all combined.
No use, I always saw language,
crude but effective tracings,
words or fragments of words
from the moving finger of a god,
a demon, an angel even.
Angels, that’s what it’s called
in the gnostic slang of pilots,
back in World War II,
“Bandits at angels 30”
gave altitude and ill intent,
till a smoke-gray shadow
spoke its will to death.
A boy from Kansas, Brooklyn,
or Alabama sweated to ice
in the wind-racked machine,
spilled the scent of fear
across the heavens
While trying to keep a sight
on tiny squares and rectangles,
the mere geometry that once
had stood for civilization,
the Gothic illusions of grace.
And another boy from Bremen
or Hamburg pointed toward heaven
and tried to slice apart
the shadows and wailing voices
with angry prayers of iron and fire.
An old woman or a child
could then consider the faces
the sky could make, the horror
the careless clouds could write,
no testament but mere graffiti.
All along, another sky watched
and waited while bones smoked
their kaddish from the crematories,
and clouds breathed it all as dust,
turned it back as ice and rain.
A century of shadows, not innocence,
where vapors wrote the history–
as a child, I once looked up to see
a metallic sliver and glint of light,
a savior, a demon, a summons
The rules are simple, and simplistic
(but not as much as War).
Each territory holds a name,
descriptive and endearing:
Central America; Ukraine,
Middle East; Siam; Congo;
each has a border with the other,
colored and separate.
The plastic men, with tiny guns,
attack across air, land,
and sea. They disappear when dead,
no bodies to be buried.
Like corporations, players have
no homeland, only armies
to deploy. In this game, there is
no profit, only conquest.
No bodies, no ruin, no loss
no consequence to meet.
The box is closed and put away
when operations cease.
I haven’t played in years,
job, family, life, and such.
But when I played, I played for fun,
and played with little risk.
That night
before your departure,
I begged God
for a drop of your likeness.
Me at home,
you at war,
and him in my womb;
I prayed for your safe return.
That was 15 years ago
and here we are once more
him and me, at home alone
while you are there, at war.
This conflict cannot end
and I, a single parent
while you are away;
can only count the days.
I ache for you without us
as I ache for us without you,
a wife with an abscent husband
and a son without a father.
Please come home.
They put their finger to your lips
And say it isn’t what it is
As the journalist just wins a prize
And the candidate is making speeches
As the military reaches
The borders of the other side
History turns the corner
The stories have grown taller
And our memories are like a passing train
The conductor rides along singing old war songs
And the passengers throw roses in the rain
A letter from a love
The feather of a dove
And a symbol that has yet to come
The devil in the guise of a lamb
Rips out the heart of a land
Where the sacred ancient temples fill with blood
I heard an angel weeping
The woe of man was deepening
Terror was the reason why
And from what I have found
It can be seen on both grounds
That each side is fixing to die
Light a candle at the vigil
For the soldier that was just killed
Put pennies on each of his eyes
Doesn’t matter what the truth is
The facts are just loose ends
That the government can buy
The torn ground
When the town might be
In the sunshine smokey airs came about
The places torn and least meant
In the course of the branches turned about
That we must work and mourn,
for mourning is the work of living
as our loved ones would have lived
and should have lived.
That there is so much to mourn,
the young people who are stolen from us by hatred
and the elders worn down by hatred,
that we must account for all aspects of mourning
and hatred for us to build ourselves up.
That hatred can kill and eat us at any moment.
That it has receptive ears poured into
from voices in all directions. That hatred asks questions
about who queer people are and who femme people are
and they seem respectable and decent
and too many people try to answer them, but hatred
does not care about our answers,
it only asks its questions to speak for itself
and keep our voices, loud though they may be, from being heard.
That hatred uses its body and voice to shut queer people
out, corral us into breathless spaces, and demand us
to stay quiet. That when we don’t, when we take these spaces
and make them our own, hatred kicks the door down
and shoots us, that hatred believes that not even in spaces
we call our own do we deserve to be alive.
That hatred cannot be negotiated with,
coddled, or disenfranchised. That every queer person
is a fighter for themselves and all others, that the fight
is about grabbing hatred from behind,
slamming it to the ground, seizing its firearms,
and smashing them into its face until it’s bloodied
and out of profanities to hurl at us.
That nothing else speaks to queer people better
than a trans woman on the Transgender Day of Remembrance
at a drag show in a queer bar in Trump country
stomping on a bigot’s face with her high heels.
