WORDS WITHOUT A SONG

-Katherine Soniat

A week after the killings, I read an overview

of the elegy.  The long thin call of birds

plays in the background; that CD

where a man's voice interrupts to name

each feathery blue and gold composer.  All

about the air waves shatter with freshly arranged

terms for war, for retribution and slaughter.

The sky holds above, earth below—

foiled, silent horizon.

And us trampling the middle air

where amaranth brightens in the rubble.

WHAT IS DANGEROUS NOT TO REMEMBER

            -Lucinda Roy

We learn pain.  It abides between our shoulders

at the base of the neck in the old pivot of wings we've lost.

Better then not to listen to flight whose sounds can damage us.

Better to love blue as a color not a point of view.

Better to be a cow in a field, cloven hooves stuck to the earth,

tongues fat with cud.  Better to let the swan

draw physics from desire and mount the air

in a blizzard of white.

Better if there were not men with a taste for steak

and an acute skill with knives.