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journey’s end
star splinters fall,
flaming across the sky
while hermit crabs dance
before the ebbing midnight tide
we sit on packed beach sand,
watching,
counting the fiery streaks
as they cross to the horizon,
burning to cinder and dispersing gas
at the end of eons of airless flight
ohhh,
you whisper,
as I hold you close
against the cold
they come from cataclysm,
from a time unimaginably past,
past suns and moons
and the loose scattered dust
of creation,
past all the unnumerable
realms of possibility
and chance,
past all that is familiar to us
and all that we can never know,
past all this they came
to die on our doorstep,
bringing glory to our night
ohhh, you whisper,
as I pull you tight
against the loneliness
of the sky
the last days of March in South Texas
clear sky, bright sun.
the last north wind of the season
pushing hard against me as I drive south,
back to the coast for another week
many weeks I’ve done this, now,
a year and a half of weeks,
north on Fridays to the rocky hills
of home, to the quiet comforts of home,
to family, to my favorite places,
then back on Sundays to the coast,
until the road is hardwired in my memory,
gray asphalt ahead and behind,
I’ll pass a hundred miles sometimes
and not remember any of them
but today is a day just past the first edge of spring,
a spring just past a wet and mild fall and winter
that now lays out on either side of the road
the soft side of South Texas chaparrel
neon green mesquite, mustard yellow huisache,
pastures of bluebonnets,
patches of creamy white buttercups,
indian paintbrushes, red or deep pink,
depending on the light, sunflowers
lining the highway on tall green stalks
and just around a softly rising curve,
a mother and her baby, sitting together
in a deep patch of bluebonnets,
the mother posing, look at daddy, she’s saying
as he circles, focusing, getting just the shot
and I think of a picture in the Times this moring,
a mother, bare feet grimy from her dirt floor,
a colorful blanket laid out by a wall, a treasure, maybe,
where, just moments before was lying the baby
she holds close in her arms, long, graceful fingers
holding the baby tight against her breast
perhaps she heard them coming,
the two soldiers standing in the open door,
rifles ready, three people afraid, not knowing,
friend or foe,
friend or foe,
the woman,
her face, under some trick of light,
a bright frozen mask in the dark interior,
the soldiers,
awash in sunlight, their backs to the camera,
tense, their hands tight on their weapons,
their fingers tight, it must be, on the triggers
and the baby sleeps at its mother’s breast,
an innocent, at a time and in a place
where innocents will die
with the wicked,
where the just and the unjust
will find a common grave
I think of all those who have died in my time
and all those who will die now
in these last bloody days of March
and I ache for the God I knew as a child,
the God of green trees and grass and cool winds
blowing soft across a pasture dancing with his colors,
the God of benelovence and compassion,
who would enfold all the mothers and babies
and frightened soldiers in the protection of his billowing robes
But that God died with the end of my childhood
and these last days of March will continue without him
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