Tremble

We've pulled back the scroll again by an hour to give
              room for the dark— though time has never bent

itself to saving, in the same way a country could never 
              be owned despite its archive of maps, its histories 

of surveillance and exchange. Two blocks away, 
             the river exhales through the day. At the terminal's

edge, sunset outlines a row of cranes so they look
             like a fleet of otherworldly sentinels, snouts 

scouting the air. And I can hardly bear to watch the news: 
             for instance, today, a father wept as he dug, in vain, 

for his children's bodies. Around the bombed ruins of homes
            can we say it is by luck or grace the living grieve? Even

the youngest ones can't stop trembling: this word, from
             the Latin tremulus—pertaining to the trauma of a wound.