Stonewall Invocation
by H.R. Luzzatto
Stone field of defiant spires
and wrinkled thumb-stumps,
what silent spectacle do you call us to see?
Is it the lichened memorial carved
in high-reaching Latin, the upright cross?
Is it the spindled tendrils of colonizing trees,
blossoms fed by memory
of the body's soft machine?
Or do you summon us to listen
to the boundless granite echo
of buried bodies,
unnamed, unmarked,
black as loam,
remembered only by mottled grass
and no flowers to see them home?
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