"Soldiers Aim at Us."
They fire
as the crowd of women flees inside the nostrils
of searchlights
--may God have a photograph of this--
in the piazza's bright air, soldiers
drag Petya's body and his head
bangs the stairs.
I
feel through my wife's shirt the shape
of our child.
Soldiers drag Petya up the stairs and homeless dogs,
thin as philosophers,
understand everything and bark and bark.
I, now on a bridge, with no camouflage of speech, a body
wrapping the body of my pregnant wife--
Tonight,
we don't die and don't die,
the earth is still,
a helicopter eyeballs my wife--
On earth
a man cannot flip a finger at the sky.
Because each man is already
a finger flipped at the sky.