Threnody

 Threnody

 

Each martial act shatters the desert owl’s

hold on the grace of night which has seeped

into day through rips in walls of sky,

through holes in the carpet of earth —

fractures of rock and pits of sand.

 

Each martial act undoes the baby’s

cry for milk, the silently feeding lips

which would continue into sleep;

and when shells lob as precise

as history it wakes before it dies.

 

Each martial act is enabled by the silence

of ‘learning’, the immanence of ‘making

a living’, an expression that falls as dead

prayers over distance, over the local.

The desert owl remembers differently.

The desert owl remembers the same.

 

 

            John Kinsella