Waves

This small act of naming

the baby born dead

This pointless hatred that I refuse to let go of,

frozen in the early July heat,
solidified along the river’s edge in the days
where the flood begins to recede, spoken
of quietly in the company of lovers, in
rooms without windows where the cameras
film ordinary atrocities, the rapes, the beheadings,
the brutal beatings that pass for commerce in
these first tentative days of the golden age,
and when I’m too tired to write something that
feels like an ending, I find the right pill in
the medicine cabinet, I speak the right name
into the mouthpiece, and all pain is
washed away.

All sorrow is burnt into

the powdery residue of fear.

The name is forgotten,

but the story leaves a stain.