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tongues

INNOCENCE IN ITS SECOND YEAR

She crouches slightly to see the horses –

a grey and a bay – through the wire fence.

They are eating windfalls of sweet chestnuts.

She watches them fully open the cupules

with their teeth then tongues to eat the nuts.

They notice her, feel safe to approach.

She is not much bigger than either of

their heads. Each half a ton, they walk with the grace

and circumspection of fifty million years.

They bend their heads towards her. Fearlessly,

she offers them grass. Gently, they take it.

 

 

 

THE WAR ON TERROR

 

2001

Riding the F Train that August –

from Queens to Manhattan, Jamaica

Estates to Times Square – were all

of the hues and tongues and tribes and faiths.

Dead at our door, on our return,

wings stretched as if in flight,

lay a hen harrier, a female.

You chose to bury it gently

in the warm September earth.

Five thousand miles away, we watched

the towers fall. Later, building Babel

replaced the grace of humanity.

So many of the peoples of the earth

had gathered there. In the plaza’s fountain,

a bronze globe had turned perpetually. All

went to dust in a whirligig of fire.

2003

Atlantic waves broke on the empty sand.

Undeterred by us, a beetle crossed the dunes.

Almost due south was Casablanca.

…in all the towns in all the world

We followed the war by satellite. Graven

effigies fell. Truths unfurled like smoke, like spume.

In the estuary – where ships from Tyre

and Ostia Antica had hoved to –

at low tide, small crabs emerged, waving.

in all the gin joints in all the towns…

Wretches, saved, like you and me!