And this one is called "How to Write a Poem in a Time of War."
And these stories are everywhere.
They're in our bones, in our DNA, stitching us.
And they're in the land.
And so, I keep hearing pieces of it
up there in that hill where we're living.
And then, I watch the news like everyone else.
And I was watching about what was going on in Syria.
And I always-- I remember the image of those twin baby girls.
And I was thinking about war and as human beings,
and how we do these, war lives within all of us.
And so what I love so much about poetry
is I never know what I'm doing.
Yeah.
I, yeah, of course there's craft and technique and all of that.
But there's the spirit of the thing.
And so I wound up in a place in this poem
that it was something given to me.
And it surprised me.
And there's two voices in this, the poet's voice.
Like I was saying, if I'm going to write a historical memoir,
I can't begin.
Where in the world am I going to begin?
And it's kind of starts with, you can't begin just anywhere.
It's a wreck.
And it's called "How to Write a Poem in a Time of War."
You can't begin just anywhere.
It's a wreck.
Shrapnel and the eye of a house, a row of houses,
there's a rat scrambling from light
with fleshy trash in its mouth, a baby strapped to its mother's
back cut loose, soldiers crawl the city,
the river, this town, the village, the bedroom,
our kitchen.
They eat everything or burn it.
They kill what they cannot take.
They rape what they cannot kill.
They take.
Rumors fall like rain, like bombs, like mother and father
tears swallowed for restless sleep,
like sunset slanting toward a moonless midnight,
like a train blown free of its destination,
like a seed fallen where there is no chance of trees
or any place for birds to live.
No.
Start here.
Deer peer from the edge of the woods.
We used to see woodpeckers the size of the sun, red birds,
and we're greeted by chickadees with their good morning songs.
We started to cook outside, slippery with dew and laughter,
oh, these smoky, sweet sunrises.
We tried to pretend war wasn't going to happen.
Though, they began building their houses all around us
and demanding more.
They started teaching our children their god's story,
a story in which we'd always be slaves.
No, not here.
You can't begin here.
This is memory shredded, because it
is impossible to hold with words, even poetry.
These memories were left here with the trees, the torn pocket
of your daughter's hand sewn dress, the sash, the lace,
the baby's delicately beaded moccasins still
connected to the foot, a young man's note of promise
to his beloved.
No, this is not the best place to begin.
Everyone was asleep despite the distant bombs.
Terror had become the familiar stranger.
Our beloved twin girls curled up in their nightgowns
next to their father and me.
If we begin here, none of us will make it
to the end of the poem.
Someone has to make it out alive,
said a grandfather to his grandson, his granddaughter,
as he blew his most powerful song
into the hearts of the children.
There, it would be hidden from the soldiers who
would take them miles, rivers, mountains from the navel cord
place of the origin story.
He knew one day, for a day, the grandchildren
would return generations later over slick highways constructed
over the old trails, through walls
of laws meant to hamper or destroy,
over stones burying libraries of the winds.
He sang us back, brought us home to these smoky green hills.
Yes, begin here.