We return then to the bleached the broken
sands and hear again an echo learned is lost.
Then west four hundred miles a smoke
of warning would rise/During these instances,
chemical changes which would require decades
herein spend scant seconds/how spilt the scraps of time?
Shadows hang much heavier this year. Rich sores from our fountains
running thin pressed for blessings. No personal order to this inheritance,
that we would arsenic our embryos someday. The storm scorns us our choices,
rains thunder to our unweighting of benefits. No prayer will yield the way.
We the divisible, a complex of occasions,
We, amnesiacs in our skin, calloused thicker
than the entire printing press of papers. A light
the arson scene and fled: They left their stench there,
amid the scores of dead composite strained red
clay lined in time from under seams. How do you
dig up these sounds? And we the born of boiler slag,
there all compelled combined in now a hundred sixteen year:
Then may they all be struck down blind on the road of their escape
Then may these unbraced visions fall and Then the settling of a seed
Then these stones may germinate Then grow out from their mistakes
Then to our geography's perimeter our doors would crack for wounded strangers
Then through these unspeaking answers we see a swell of memory
Then this the consequence
Then an uprising/a defense
that we might be