Solidarity
Careless, standing in the moment, gulf and redact,
censorship accumulates at my bare feet
like candy wrappers.
A small, bloodied boy
takes off his baseball cap to show me his wound,
beet red in a round gash, the size
of a Franklin half-dollar. He isn’t crying, just
a little surprised and scared. He doesn’t know
enough to be scared. But the others, falling
through the glass windows of shops selling
electronics, selling kebabs, selling postage
and airline tickets to somewhere else, know too
much to be surprised. Even the hollow,
low moans of the old woman slumped over
a steel mesh trash bin, translate as
the boredom of expectation and dulling
predictability. This is not a place to stand,
not like a stream, but riverside; the bodies,
green fists and black masks of remembrance
heave past the sidewalk banks, gathering
up more of the fragile earth, trees, and rocks.
The underpinnings whittle, the foundations
erode by precipitous degree until
all that remains intact is the roaring will to flood.
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