OK.
I guess everybody's back. huh?
Uh.
In this portion of the program I'd
like to divide it equally between poems about war
and poems about love.
Just seems like a fair balance.
This one is called "On an East Wind from the Wars."
The wind came in for several thousand miles all night
and changed the close lie of your hair this morning.
It has brought well-traveled seabirds who
forget their passage, singing.
Old songs from the old battle and burial grounds
seem new in new lands.
They have to do with spring, as new and seeming
as the old air idling in your hair, in fact.
So new, so ignorant of any weather not your own.
You like it, breathing in a wind that
swept the battlefields of their worst smells and took the dead,
unburied, to the potters' field of air.
For miles, they sweetened on the sea spray.
The foul washed off, and what is left is spring to you,
love, sweet.
The salt, blown past your shoulder luckily.
No wonder your laugh rings like a chisel,
as it cuts your children's new names
in the tombstone of thin air.