On Hearing of the Cancellation of the Al-Sendian Festival
Where a father laid out
too soon tips the bird
from the olive branch
And the cedar wood
buckles under wind
and laniaries of dust
Gut earth’s blood-lock
for toy silence in Tartous
—the thresh of a sniper
On the mosque scaffold
blurred and wracked
by a prong of stars
Cold coins to the general
low oud in the courtyard
a widow’s cello moan
And the bricked road
and the red road banked
by memorial flowers
The portraits of sons
missing at the funeral
undead at the checkpoint
At the rubbled amphitheatre
where a soldier looks back
from the black canvas
Juniper-eyed at the unmade
window—a red eagle
deadly to the throne
Bones and Blood
Where might the sitting council sit
On Martyrs Road? Will they bud
More lime-green shoots to spout
Over the military garden? No calm
In the hedgerow along the dark mile
Of the street, the bolt of a gunbarrel
Juts from the grills like a baited snake,
The guards remain vigilantly poised,
Wide-eyed in a weft of hammocks.
Why—for over thirty years—a 32°
Chill still pervades the pagoda road?
And why—after years of mopping up
Bones and blood—do the stray dogs
Still cower, lapping at betel juice?
Bilu
Bilu—who gobbled up children for four thousand years
and stalked Dasagiri through the slopes of Mount Popa
booming the great gong of his voice—now folds/refolds
the blue-red silks of his democratic tie (demon-embossed)
and sends sudden felicitations to Venezuelan diplomats,
engineering execs. from the Koreas and the febrile British.
Bilu fleecing the public bank account as he funnels off rice
in exchange for bottle factories (re-forged from the ghost
of abandoned Socialist factories). His children in the North
spray bullets at a blazing jungle, and in the South, (uneaten,
but wholly devoured), they break rocks with their hands.
Bilu addresses the Western assembly in a tongue of whispers,
of how he has reformed from centuries of piling up bones,
while, in the East, a boy lights the matchbox of a minefield.