EMENESCU'S WAVES

We read by the stars, we make love by the moon, we weep when the
sun comes upand when the sun goes down we break our promises and
make new ones, we count our blessings and fill our socks with coins and
folding money, we turn the sheets down and we dream of summer 
fields and children we will make together, many children, thoughtless 
children and brave, our own children careless as the world is careless 
and brave and carefree, and everything is okay across nations and 
fields, and the cities are not dying, neither does the rust belt rust, 
and on the open plains endless waves of children are returning, children 
who will fulfil their promises and become stronger than us, men and 
women who will honor the gods and respect each other, who will 
commend and sacrifice and make children of their own and start again

Even as this blood of mine sheds, even as this voice of mine rises like 
coal dust rising, falls like snow in the mountains, settles like fossils in 
the deep, even as my heart waits like this soil of an hour or an eternity 
waits, or standing at the furnace with the men who sweat and strain 
and stoke the flames, i sweat and strain also, mechanically, humanly, I 
shed and fall, I am a civilization crumbling, I am a new world rising,
there is no choice in the matter

In this cup of wine, sweet pleasures and forgetfulness; in this foundry
of iron, ghetto rust

In this neon light the light of an oil lamp, my grandmother at a cottage
window, folding blankets and sewing, my grandmother a thread unto
herself, skein of generations, a patchwork of endurance against pain, a
woman whose life might have been extinguished childless but for some
unusual thing which occurred a generation ago and an ocean away

A woman of luck a woman of hope and stubbornness, strong of hip and 
endless carriage, impossibly strong, who might have danced in palaces 
but she was of the peasant kind, a woman who lives on in your quick 
eye and the quicker steps of our own children as they walk out with us 
through snowy fields and out along the open shoreline, who walk as i 
walk, with my collar up, who walk as you walk, with your arms swinging 
freely, and the waves leap like waves, and fall

Emenescu's waves

And i do not taste in their rising the ocean's brine, neither the bite of 
wind nor the fermentation of grain, but sunlight on perpetual fields, 
courtship and death and labor, dawn to dusk, the dappled heads of 
mice in hay, the eminence of wheat piled high under the tousled sun, 
baskets of apples and leather straps, horse flesh 

And the singular smell of my own children, scalp and hair and dander of 
my sons and daughters, hair upon hair upon hair, a grain which is the 
future and meets our own dying grain, that carries us forward like a 
cartwheel fresh from the blacksmith's forge, this death and this 
transfiguration, there is no death at all, all is well, all is well, take my 
hand