from “Soft Targets”

A breath leaves the body, and wishes it could return maybe,
the news to the left and right rich with failure, terror, dither,
the bloated moon in constant charge of us like vapor—
 
and this did frame our constituency, even in our cozy homes
even in a painless state on the downriver, oh oblivion—
sipping champagne as another night brings forth its big dancing plan its damage.
 
I had a thought but it turned autumn, turned cold.
I had a body, unwearied, vital, despite the funeral in everything—
ample with bodies, covered in graves and gardens, potholes and water,
 
an ardent river we walked together, a wine and rising breeze.
Much trouble at hand, yet the lilies still.
That summer we sat with our backs to the street, letting time  pass—
 
lying all afternoon in the grass as if green and insect were the world.
I am, I am, and you are, you are, we wrote, until the paper seemed a tree again
and we walked beneath it greener and unsullied afresh.
 
Massive powers that be, what will be?
We smoke our pipes to forget you
& mildly now we bide our time
 
the violence and real cities under siege,
but also filled this morning
with coffee drinkers, office workers, taxi drivers, boys on bikes.
 
Golden we were in the moment of conception,
and alive, as if we always would be.
 
Credit

Copyright © 2017 by Deborah Landau. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 25, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem
“This poem is excerpted from a long lyric sequence, ‘Soft Targets,’ which was written after the recent terror attacks in Paris. The random cruelty of that violence—and the body’s terrible vulnerability in the city—haunted and continues to haunt me.”
—Deborah Landau