Poem in Late October, with Lines from Limón

                    "The war.      The war.        The war."

                                                                   - Ada Limón, from "The Hurting Kind"


Like you, I have always been a weeper
          from a long line of weepers. No one escapes
the documentary of days—there's no end to the delivery 
         of ruin and rubble, pictures of blasted hospitals where 
children clutch their torn chests as their mothers' fingers 
         try to comb ashes out of their hair. I have dreams of running 
through landscapes of flattened dunes and decimated gardens.
         And today is grief again, is feeling the same wounds pulled open 
before any chance to heal. Yesterday I woke up and the rumble 
         in the street was trash bins falling on their sides after the trucks 
set them down, though not carefully.  A friend dropped off fruit 
        from her tree, globes of orange so warm beside the small 
dead bird she found on the front stoop. Every little thing, brushed 
       with omen or sadness before someone has even pinned it to the wall.