This first appeared in Exileschild 11/22/16. Strange how poetry adapts to its context.
How swiftly came the killing season
swept in from hinterlands
just when we had remarked upon
the sameness of it all.
How soon the must-not-be-named
became quotidian.
Weren’t we standing there,
thinking how wise it was
to not raise a ruckus
about minor disturbances,
how preferable to simply
turn our backs to the foul wind?
What good will be our platitudes
tomorrow?
There, in a glass case
in the Cairo Museum
lay Rameses II, who imagined
that all who looked upon
his works would despair.
Desiccated, a shrunken pith
of a man, he reminded me
of nothing else but
the last slab of salted cod
at the closing of the market,
unsold.
Despair, indeed, my king,
but not the way you imagined.
I remember a moment in fifth grade,
when it was announced
that Sister Bernardo,
who taught seventh grade,
had died.
There was this brief
eruption of joy that
we would not, ever,
have to endure
her legendary cruelty.
It was an utterly spontaneous, and
therefore uncontrollable, eruption
which collapsed almost
immediately into despair.
There stood, at the head
of the classroom,
Sister Mary Henry,
in all her indominable
forbiddenness, and we knew
that she had recorded the reaction
of each and every child
in her prodigious
and never-failing memory.
There was a June when it rained
As it rained every June
Anyone could remember
All day, every day, every night
A rain so fine you could breathe it
So swollen you could drown
In the tall grass never knowing
Why, eyes wide and mouth agape
That June as wet inside as out
The earth heaved upward
As the rain kept falling
The sky without warning red as blood
I remember now, a voice was calling
“Come back through the long grass,
Come back through the red, red rain.”
But the red rain was you.
For all I know
I’m standing on someone’s
unremembered grave
exiles child 