How We Became Human

There is no poetry where there are no mistakes, said the next messenger. I
am a human being, I said.

I’d rather understand how to sing from a crow
who was never good at singing or much of anything
but finding gold in the trash of humans.

So what are we doing here I ask the crow parading on the ledge of
falling that hangs over this precarious city?

Crow just laughs and says wait, wait and see and I am waiting
and not seeing anything, not just yet.

But like crow I collect the shine of anything beautiful I can find.

There are strangers above me, below me, and all around me and
we are all strange in this place of recent invention.

What kind of nation is this
Deleting love from its curriculum
The art of poetry
The mystery of women’s eyes
What kind of nation is this
Battling each rain cloud . . .
—Nizzar Kabbani

the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our children while we sleep.

breathing
is rooted somewhere other than the lungs.

It is still smoldering
motivated by the love of one deity for another.
It’s an old story and we’re in it so deep we have become them.

You can manipulate words to turn departure into aperture, but you cannot figure the velocity of love and how it enters every equation. It’s related to the calculation of the speed of light, and how light prevails.