"We have passed the great Trauma.
These wounds disclose our loss."

memory: farfields of morning,
        maimd winter, wheel and hoofhammerd weeds,
bare patches of earth. We heard rumor of the rape
among the women who wait at the wells with dry urns,
talk among leaves and among the old men
who sift tin cans and seashells searching for driftwood
to make fires on cold hearthstones. Stone hearts
and arteries hardend to stone.
                 This sound of our mourning, wailing of reeds,
comes over the ice and the grey wastes of water.
We listen: it shrieks thru the ruins of cities,
whistles in shellholes
and freezes like ether in our lungs.

Shades falling under the oakshadow... shade upon shade
intent with their sorrow. The lust of such sorrow
listless, moving over the leafmold,
footmolded and hoofmolded, spoors of past violence.
From such clay our roots writhe, sucking the life
from corpsemold and footclay
and mold of skull rooting.

Spore-spotted Onan, baldheaded, trickling with seed,
moved among us, or troops of swift women pursuing the leopard
passd. The quite unbroken, dark beneath dark
branches spotted with light; or a flute in the morning
made truce, awakening the leaves like birds.
We shot green from the bark to flute music,
moving out from the trunk in a dream.

The sun was like gold on my body,
roots in the cold dark below me and arms
from the slender trunk showered in gold light and shadows,
fingers green seeking the sun.

Lost, lost such peace, and Persephone lost.
Last dream brought silence,
silent thread of death-threatening dream.

We remember in symbols such violence:
the splintering of rock, the shock of the trauma,
in which she was taken from us. Shade
falls under the shadow... shade upon shade.
Spotted with bonewhite, splinter of driftwood,
the bark wet with terror, no sleep,
only waiting. Only we wait, our wounds barely heald
for the counterattack before sunrise.