C R Y

Morning though a city garden widens
its swath. Shiny eyes of cinquefoil,
azure eyes of myosotis, bruised lobelia
refused to blink. Intruders trapped in a cross-stare
harden, crumble into fine
dustings because our sympathies
will not adapt to sun and cinquefoil: our world
steel and concrete, oil and song.
We hoist our lives high over the drone
of traffic and screwing gulls, hoist bags
of soil to terraces at the setbacks; set out
cinquefoil, watch its leavings, count
its days. Some days we doze in the sun
and dream we too are cinquefoil or lobelia,
blowing and blanching without demur.
Then pneumocysticis breaks.
We open our eyes to the skyline we incised.
and know as a jet cuts through cloud that
cities are our gardens, with their stench
and contagion and rage, our memory, our sepals
that will not endures these waves
of dying friends
without a cry.

Michael Lynch – 1944-1991

Circles of Stone:
To Those Unnamed

We stand at this place; among earth and stone, branch and birch-
In darkness and in light, through sun and storm, rain and trees,
leaves and breezes: Life and Death
Our strength, though withered and sapped, regenerates here.

Each name on each standing stone remarks thousand fold
upon those unremarked from sea to sea; pole to pole.
The earth would quake with the strength of our memories
flood with the loss of our tears, and in tandem; We exist.

How tall these stones have to grow?
How wide? How all-encompassing, how awesome?
To announce this radical interruption of humanity.
These standing stones might sprout like high rises,
watered by lovers left behind.
Further stones planted, the last meets the first; A circle is formed.
Its volume gains inhabitants. Admitting entrance without discrimination.

The world mourns while we embrace the lives and the times,
Whether a name is engraved in steel or sand, in heart or in mind;
In flesh or in form; we will remember.
And mark the day we have no further need for such
Circles of Stone.

Shoshanna Jey Addley