What Can I Say

.

for human being

Someones flew a plane into a building

Or did a building fly into a plane, and then

Many someones are continuing to be alive

And some too dead; yet little has been learned

And the wars continue though who

Is fighting whom cannot be said, it all feels

So confused as though the parts no longer fit,

Or was it a failure of original creation

To leave us sans the ability to speak

To one another, some kind of freak arrival

Here on earth as now sometimes seems, too late

To help ourselves, stuck as in quicksand in

A standing pool of language, thickened then with

The algae and flotsam of time

And fear, coagulating to clog

The throat; the conscience anyway never clear…

And then one hears, from inside the dark city, a voice:

So this is what happens when the enemy is at the gate...

Time passes like this for me: it was 12 o'clock

The apple was on the tree

It was 12 o'clock and a second

The apple was not on the tree

I ate the apple and still am falling

Gracefully...

All these wars we have lost have

Pointed up the contradictions of the ethos,

The ways isolated individuals within a system

Behave do not constitute the rules of the game,

The ritual sanction of the poem demands a forgetting

After one has departed the earth, but how --

How to go on now, how to unlearn the memorized phrases,

How to build sentences of such transparency

The strange accidence of those pictures of the dead

Peels away to reveal a grammar of humanness --

Life our school, knowledge of suffering our teacher?

Italicized text lines: by human being, 2009

A glance at heaven: vault at the Nasr ol Molk mosque, Shiraz: photo by dynamomosquito, 2008

Another glance at heaven: vault at the Nasr ol Molk mosque, Shiraz: photo by dyanamomosquito, 2007

Eternity: ceramic tile mosaic, roof of the tomb of Persian poet Hafez, province of Fars, 2008: photo by dynamomosquito, 2008