Dropped in a thin cardboard box
Individually wrapped in wax paper.
Discrete, released
            Between tears and anger and fear:
The satisfaction of bitter revenge.
Crumbs and icing
            Lingering on neighbors’ palates,
Washed down with spilt milk, puddled.
First tower fell,
            Old, orientalist hatreds confirmed,
Second:  new orientalist hatred birthed.
Since the first year–
            The raw and doughy first year–
Glazed with crumbled, steely, human ash,
Memory crawls,
            Arching from feeling to fact,
Justifying the wrong war, the long war.
Crusaders fall
            Into formations against infidels,
Racking up mortality, reifying vague animus.
Pain morphs outward,
            Each day, each year of the dozen
From rubble to stage to memorial.
Numbed and numbered,
            Iced and stuffed and frosted, for
Each consumer for each year for each loss
Lived and re-lived,
            Slightly differently: reconfigured malice,
In the mellowing shadow of time:
Where anger wains,
            Welcoming detached objectivity,
Building monuments on finally covered graves.
Consume sweet cake:
            Remnant around the bitter, excised hole
Of a dozen bravely endured–
                       
                                                Blood-
                        And-bullet-baptized, Oil-and-Shari’a justified,
            Daily battles with despair.                                          Baked and unleavened.
Dense, battered past.                                                             Decades to dozens,
            Birthing a second dozen, then pointillated scores, brushing loose                
                        the sweetbreads of centuries yet uncounted:  yet
                                                                        unforgotten.

            Lasting but minutes:
Joy, joy, joy, Bliss.

            Really, not always:
Often much less.

            Attaching to walls:
Life quickened, or

             Unborn, aborted,
Birth unfulfilled.

            De-gifted spirit,
Born to heaven.
 
Some blessed, carried to term with affection: released
With conflicted pain
To others’ arms.

            In communal love,
Communed in woe.

New bosom entreating life, gifted: mother, child
            Reclaiming lost hope,
Circle rounded.

            The next, touched by God,
Gives all but birth. 
 
Sacrifice and gain commingle in the prophet
            Whose gratitude
Bi-directions:

            And gave of her womb
Toward destiny.
 
To the mother who claimed him as hers and loved him,
            And gave of her heart
                        Unrestrictedly,
           
            And gives of her heart
                        To the world:
                                    Her love:
                                                Her son:
                        Unrestrictedly.

          Heir by assassin’s blades,
Victor over Egyptian war temptress,
          Victor over her bedeviled lover,
Reigning over new Rome, over Christ’s birth.

At his feet we linger, Emperor,
          Shaking his leg like the
Trunk of a majestic oak, gazing up,
          Rustling and jostling just-purpling leaves,
Awaiting paper-thin, breezy fall rain.

          Toward loosely gathered piles—
Apologies, remorse, half-lived lessons—
          Away from slouch-massed, bloodied Julius,
Away from gilded, laurel-girded youth.

          Wholly neither, scaling
Onward, lightly bathed in misty humid
          Remembrances after pink, pre-sunset
Thundershowers give way to golden dusk.

          On still damp, sodded fields,
And dew points dropping, cicadas buzzing,
          Geese gathering, threatening planned south-flight,
Diesel buses grind gears up hills toward schools.

Scraping back and forward, maybe two
          Generations each way,
For a minute, as playmates from our spring
          Lean too hard-shouldered into their own trunks:
Green-leaved yet, vernal ghosts left, early-dimmed.       

Clinging still to Caesar’s fatted calf,
          Our parents stand knee-deep
In piles beneath their own oaks, having shook
          Their own same trees not very long ago:
Each autumnal birth, a spring conception.