It begins this way: your breath
    -less heave into cluttered room & booze-braided air

after another night in a world rippled
    by the years we’ve left behind. & I say, cleave to me

as you would to everything you lost to love
    for a country we once called home. Hold me & be

still, beloved. The ghosts you hear across
    the blackened fields are only smothered stars

casting their phantom reflections. & there
    are no ravens here picking clean any bullet

-blotted bone. There is only us
    & this single sliver of history turning

weightless as a dandelion clock
    in the chorus of the wind. & beyond this room

is true music, just a threshold away.
    The sound of the world shuffling incomplete without

you, as if to tell you you are a god
    -gracious detail in the cosmic picture of survival.

Listen, the silence calling forth from the gut
    of the earth is a mere distraction from the sun’s leap:

a way of shoring up the walls till the body
    rusts away from the light. Are you listening?—

you have to. You are the healing
    that must come through it all. A petaled song

sprouting on acres of aching centuries. A bird
    -lit morning bubbling into someone else’s twilight,

lustrous as this one light
    -ly rapping, even now, at every shut door

in the stirring city.

 
 
Credits:
Editors: Poetry Department
Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department
Accessibility: Accessibility Editors