September 11th, 2021

A poem.

a busy day at the graveyard

on the green hill not far from the bay.

hired cars shiver on the sloped drive.

a looming fall strokes the fingers of the trees.

stone-etchers, photographers, loafers in the grass--

a generation reminded that It Cannot Remember

What It Was Like Before is here to toe

across the clipped lawns, searching

for those remnants of the past,

rocks resurfaced by the passing rain.

there is now something we call late capitalism,

in actuality, another interest payment,

another restructure for credit backed by deconstructed bodies,

debt-engines to feed the bellies of ships now waiting

for their place in the docks. 

look at them, sea-rusted on the water, 

empty containers stacked like undiagnosed tumors.

they remain there, & we remain here,

behind the lens of heat

above the anxious highway.

the cemetery gates stay open

past dusk. we wander, fingers aged

by touch-collected moss. 

there is a bench, a place to be, for now. 

twin sweetgums frame the place 

where twenty years before

two towers owned the sky.

nearby, a thin rise of marble

marks where colonizers failed

to halt the march of other colonizers.

then, a flashlight's golden voice:

time to go,

back into the city, another Saturday

for dollars to change hands

as easy as summer loyalty.

if there's a lesson here,

it's held between two souls in defiance

of the order to depart,

chit-chat of tomorrow,

the 12th, as gunless guards approach. 

I make for the gates; I've been taught to leave. 

as was the truth last year, 

now this, until the next:

this poem will accomplish nothing.