Читать книгу Alphabet Year - Devon Miller-Duggan - Страница 11

Again: Poppies & Flags for a war whose soldiers gone

by into the bield of forgetting remembrance forgetting. I am not

certain how spring bulbs’ leaves bayonet up through soil without grinding

down their tips, raggeding them like dried blood.

Each eleven seemed sufficient

for peace. Bones and old shells still push through French soil, ragged as dry blood.

Gather, Old Soldiers, 100 years & the same war push up bloodied, same

how same millions, row on row. How bulbs lance upward; spring.

I learned to recite “In Flanders’ Fields” in 8th grade. Did

justice best I could. It’s all armistice,

kenosis, each soldier relinquishing divinity, each

leaf within bulb gives up milky safety of sleep, pushing upward.

Meanwhile: Omaha, Nagasaki, Pusan, My Lai, Rwanda, West Bank, Helmand—

nay bloom in 100 years not red—

or genocide, genocide, genocide, cleansing, genocide—forced kenosis.

Nay bloom in 100 years not red.

Perhaps this time. Perhaps un-red blooms spear through some spring.

Quiet as rows of white stone—

returning bulbs, rows planted wrong season, heads down.

Some numbers: 11/11/11; 21 (years not at war); 86,600,000 (deaths in I&II)—always come down

to one & one & one & will

until Ground demands ploughshares, & gods require no bloodcleansing.

Vent-able—everything that lives can be pierced.

Whether anything survives kenosis, beyond keening, breaking apart even

xylem, draining fluids until even wood weeps.

Yet more. Yet poppies & bloodgrounds.

Zenith, n. The peak at which lesson spears ground, unshredded, blooms.

Bield (noun), shelter or home. Archaic.