people in twos orbit the thick clean stores,

their muscular viruses, hot to survive,

slide from hand to hand along the franklins;

some horses huddle near a live oak, still against the rain

or stand, wet through, eating slowly cold

green grass, haunches shining amber;

like a girl who doesn’t know her beauty, oil

presses upward through the shale, sea floor, sand, a

blue-black rainbow glistening unguent will;

a line of sunlight, dirty, gold, spreads wide

along a hilltop for a last few seconds crepuscule

two walking stop, stop talking, and stand still;

in a song about the future kids are yelling

how their bodies crash deliciously

together, how they’ll be this crash forever; while

Mohamed Bouazizi, Peace Be On Him, lights a fire. dies.

steam, like incense from his body, rises to the sky

and spreads a thousand miles on the sirocco, and despots fall.

At home, two mallards sleep in cedar shadow, heads

tucked under wing, his iridescent emerald, hers

the color of her body, brown and small

their eyes at rest, the beak’s full hardness

sheathed in sleep; dreaming silver flashes close

below the wave, of bodies given, never asked

(what would you ask for?) only

light, Mohammed said (the Other, Peace), “light

on my eyes, upon my skin, light in my mouth”

upon my pores, my dendra, capillaries, cells,

and mitochondria in their dance, light on the double

spiral and the one who climbs that stair

light on tiny drops of water rising through the air

February 2011

Revolutions in Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli

may all be free

∞

From the “Online Exclusives” for the Spring 2013 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 29, No. 2)

© 2013 Sean Feit