And isn’t everything risk?

The beloved lives 
Then dies,
Then (if we’re lucky) 
Rises again 
Into a poem or song

Or into the world 
In some other form 
Impossible to predict.

Simplest story, oldest tale: 

Sparrows sing it
From every hedge;

And swallows, also, 
From their nests on the ledge. 

The family I’m staying with,  
because my father is working,  
have called their dog Darkness,  
and it is a beautiful name.  
I’ve decided to camp.  
And out here in an old tent  
on the edges of their property,  
Darkness encircles me.  
I burrow my back into the field,  
strangely soft with a grass I don’t  
know the name of. I should know  
the names of grasses, and of trees,  
and of so many things.  
                                    Soon, the thick  
wind loosens into coolness and the light  
begins to dim. As I look up into Darkness,  
the underside of her tongue is spotty  
with inky-on-pink constellations.  

Her body makes me think of my own body,  
my fingertips dry as match heads 
that will light this nameless grass if I’m  
not careful. 
                  Darkness is a good teacher,  
and she guides me to be gentle with myself.  
With a nuzzle of her head into my hand,  
she says, in her way, that I am ok.  
I stroke her so long that the heavy night  
settles, and all that is left is the white blaze  
on her chest. 
          Soon, my eyes, and I, will adjust.  
But for now, I’m suspended,  
in this moment that is the sum  
of all moments.  
The grass, it occurs to me,  
is bluestem. The air is amniotic.  
And I cry a good cry as the great dog  
keeps on guarding me. 

^{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.