Listen when philosophers talk
about their memories of bunkers
and bleak years, but also when
they speak of hope. Envisioning
the future helps us act in certain
ways, so we might make that future
happen— a world where mycelial nets
underfoot give irrefutable proof
of the impossibility of borders,
where fields become living archives
of species we can name again in our
own tongues. I'm not saying
that atrocity did not happen,
that there are those who didn't will-
fully withhold aid as they blitzed
from world to world, torching what they
found for sport. I'm not saying forget how
destruction proceeds in methodical and
not random ways. The call to violence
at times can sound deceptively like prayer.
A congregation gathered on the steps turns
into a mob. History is a record. Poems
gather inventory of what we lose, grieve,
survive. This is how we remember.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
