Tag Archives: anniversary

Palm Reading

When you work with clay
you learn to enjoy the dirt,
the silt feels like silk curtains
drawn on an autumn day.

You learn to listen to the skin,
hear all the whispers spoken,
and whisper back tender questions,
that teach of the two of you together.

When you work with clay,
you explore abstract places,
pursuing adventures of vulnerability,
to discover (not exactly create) truth.

You learn that truth, alone, is nothing,
without you to define and assess it.
You make yourselves a part of that truth,
and what you sculpt together is your truth reforged.

When you can no longer work the clay,
you instead knead the aches and pains,
worn, cracked hands rather than a bust or vase,
but a landscape of passion all the same;

where peaks and valleys boast of conquest,
scars and coloration sing of compassion;
nowhere is the silence of smooth skin.
With clay my hands have been broken in.

Anniversary

Twenty years ago the two towers fell
The terrorist attack of nine eleven.
Forced to reconcile a new kind of hell
Sending all those poor souls off to “heaven.”
The world witnessed these events horrified
I saw the change coming. For that I cried.

The terrorist attack of nine eleven
Set us against many other nations
As if that would find the problem leavened
Rather than drown us in complications.
Almost three thousand died in the attack;
We’ve spent two decades now getting them back.

Sending all those poor souls off to “heaven”
Continues to be our bread and butter
With blackwater in two thousand seven
Countless others that would cause a shutter
And all the young people we sacrificed
Those lives that congress has precisely priced.

The world witnessed these events, horrified
As we tore nations and families apart
Our grief and rage could never be subdued
Few ever examined the exposed heart
Killing people often creates profit
An angry public will welcome the deposit

I saw the change coming. For that, I cried.
It was hard to watch those people burning,
Worse knowing that day that more than they had died.
The attack was a desperate yearning
To be given respect on the world stage
But instead we bred terror for the coming age.