When a good wind arrives to shuffle the cloudy dark,
the moment's derived from a previous state.
History proceeds, you learn, by such swings:
from stasis to revolution to a new regime, until
out of the bombed plazas and bloody battlefields,
the new-crowned victors settle into their thrones.
The laws of motion and change don't stop.
Bodies smarting from centuries of deprivation
also yearn to rest in the idea of rest— why not?
Yet freedom's never a finished project:
the pendulum arcs from one extreme to the next.
Monuments topple but dictators' children try to change
the narratives of murderous power, unscrupulous power.
And then the people swell the streets again.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.