^{after Gwendolyn Brooks}

My wild grief didn’t know where to end.
Everywhere I looked: a field alive and unburied.
Whole swaths of green swallowed the light.
All around me, the field was growing. I grew out
My hair in every direction. Let the sun freckle my face.
Even in the greenest depths, I crouched
Towards the light. That summer, everything grew
So alive and so alone. A world hushed in green.
Wildest grief grew inside out.

I crawled to the field’s edge, bruises blooming
In every crevice of my palms.
I didn’t know I’d reached a shoreline till I felt it
There: A salt wind lifted
The hair from my neck.
At the edge of every green lies an ocean.
When I saw that blue, I knew then:
This world will end.

Grief is not the only geography I know.
Every wound closes. Repair comes with sweetness,
Come spring. Every empire will fall:
I must believe this. I felt it
Somewhere in the field: my ancestors
Murmuring Go home, go home—soon, soon.
No country wants me back anymore and I’m okay.

If grief is love with nowhere to go, then
Oh, I’ve loved so immensely.
That summer, everything I touched
Was green. All bruises will fade
From green and blue to skin.
Let me grow through this green
And not drown in it.
Let me be lawless and beloved,
Ungovernable and unafraid.
Let me be brave enough to live here.
Let me be precise in my actions.
Let me feel hurt.
I know I can heal.
Let me try again—again and again.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

^{for Renee Nicole Good
          1988–2026}

The fall is the crashing, a sudden brightness,
call it a snapping twig on a broken tree,
call it the never fulfilled promises of freedom
                        of returning what was stolen.

Popping is what I remember from being trained
in subzero mid-winter, boy soldier boy
studying the sickness of projectiles sent into flesh,
the popping that excites the sick nerves
of men who order us to shoot, men who forget
their own sickness to call it courage.

What of the word used so often, what
of that tender softness her children will not hear
in the moment, who will have to trust memories
and stories of her saying it’s okay, I love you

                        —like Tupac resisting

she now breathing forgiveness to her murderer.

            What of the wind’s song in the crashing
of an empire, the way it cracks with howling shrillness,
insane with fear of a colonial ending, turning
in the air to see its one blood-filled eye being put out
now ...

            here where a poet names this moment
            for what it is, another crackling flame,
            in the wall of fire, not yet an apocalypse,

but the calculus of fools.

^{January 11, 2026}

The best ones 
I ever ate I ate

that summer, him dead 
six months, me not yet

forevered again 
to anyone. Tomatoes

the only fever, many- 
chambered, jelly-seeded

—probably slicers, 
nothing rare. Dissected

into the same glass bowl 
night after night for a dinner

date with the pulpy sun 
on its way through

my yard. Fayetteville, 
Arkansas, city of wreckage.

Mozzarella, basil, salt. 
Oil, the August air

humid, nearly liquid. 
One evening I sat

on my back stoop 
in a puddle of light

and knew I could live 
without him, and was. 

I ate the same dinner 
from the same bowl

until the decision 
ceased to be a decision.

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.—Soft you now!

The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my sins remember'd.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

    That mark our place; and in the sky

    The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

    Loved and were loved, and now we lie

        In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe: 

To you from failing hands we throw

    The torch; be yours to hold it high. 

    If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

        In Flanders fields.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

^{If I die, I want a loud death. I don’t want to be just 
breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death
that the world will hear, an impact that will remain
through time, and a timeless image that cannot be
buried by time or place. 
         —Fatima Hassouna, Gaza photo journalist,
         on April 15, before her death on April 16, 2025}

Like the sound waves in space that tear 
the remnants of supernovas, and twist the paths
of light
           so maybe this is why some spiral galaxies 
like Messier 77 resemble ears. 
                                                   But also when  
sunset splinters its light over the ridgeline and 
the fireflies in this ravine cry desperately to save it,
  
or when the embers from last night’s crackling 
campfire tremble, 
     or when our dog begins to fear
the sounds we do not hear,
        then we know those waves
have touched us too.
                         For it is the silence after 
the plane’s screech or the missile’s strike,
a kind of voiceless scream
                                           that her photos captured
even as she stood among the rubble looking up
as if those waves could also signal a moment’s
desperate hope.
                        There is so much we do not hear—
the rumble of shifting sand dunes, the purr and drum 
of the wolf spider, the echoes of bats, the explosions 
on the sun, the warning cry of the treehopper, but

it’s the cry of those buried alive we so often refuse
to hear as too distant or beyond our reach to help,

yet even an elephant’s infrasound, which can be 
detected by herd members as far as 115 miles
brings them to safety,
which tells us, well, 
tells us what?
                             It was Jesus (Luke 19:40)
who said if these keep silent, then the very stones
will cry out.
                      Here, the news moves on to the next
loudest story,
                      or some chat on the phone blares
the latest scandal, score or personal interest.
In Gaza, 
one journalist warned, a press vest makes you a target.

In one photo a hand reaches through the rubble is if 
it were reaching to speak, 16 April 2025, from Al-Touffah.

In the end, it was the sound of her home collapsing.

In the end, we are all targets in our silences.

In the end, we know her absence the way each syllable 
shouts its lament, pleading from inside each of these words.

Tomorrow’s but a dream, dear Alice, 
In truth, it never appears; 
The past, a tenantless old palace, 
Where hope lies tombed in tears; 
The urn is broken, Alice, 
Whence incense rose above; 
But you may see, if you will, today, 
The magical haunts of love.

My fancy sees a chalice, 
A harp all strung, attuned, 
A famed, enchanted palace, 
Where Cupid oft communed; 
The theme of his dreaming, Alice, 
In waking or sleeping the same, 
A glory that ever dazzles, 
Till it sets the soul a-flame.

Like the burning bush on Horeb, 
Or lit phosphoric seas, 
The dream is metamorphosed, 
And Cupid makes wild pleas, 
For a glance of your dark eyes, Alice, 
And a touch of your lips, my dear, 
For all the bliss of caressing, 
Laughter, and song, and cheer.

’Tis to you and none other, Alice, 
My thought reverts in its flight, 
A little perhaps out of ballas’, 
Perhaps with too much delight; 
So crude, so humble and callous 
That a message it scarce can bear, 
From a heart that wears your image, 
And the passion that fixed it there.

Come thou with me, dear Alice, 
To where there’s building for thee 
A loved, charmed, magical palace, 
Hard by the Mexic sea; 
Where date, and spice and lemon 
Doth blow perpetually, 
By that enchanted palace 
That looks out over the sea.

Tomorrow? That’s cruel, Alice, 
Why speak of a day that is not? 
That spoils the bliss of living, 
Makes mine a miserable lot, 
And love’s enchanted palace 
A wild and desolate place; 
No land of dates and flowers 
Wert blessed without thy grace.