Poem-a-Day

sees my mother seated up in bed, unable to move 

of her own accord, lips parched from medication, 

she begins to sing, a chant, an Arab song, 

from her childhood, eyes almost transparent.  

My two aunts, or they would have been my aunts, 

who died in infancy . . . from pneumonia? . . .

scarlet fever? . . .  no one alive now knows. 

What was, when my mother was a child, in the air

of the world’s most industrialized city? Blessings 

and horrors, raw orange sunsets, that blue flame 

burning is industry, the smell of incense rising 

in the fabulous churches, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Aramaic 

liturgies, descendants of inventors of alphabets. 

After midnight humid and hot. The dead are wherever 

we are. They’re not just details, these tears of bliss. 

Survival’s what’s involved. Furious, the fate

that keeps watch. Everything’s something else and yet itself

at the same time. Home, you know? Everyone 

and everything is related. Wet steel-blue morning, thin, 

purple salvias near the backyard fence. Your Grandpa’s 

dead, I, the baby, must have heard it said.