For Abdul Rahim Ahmed Abdul Rahim Awad, Age 0

 


Often there is bone-trill in me

When birds of prey near. Their wings

Displacing air, the sound dopplered

& trailing. Yesterday an eagle eight feet

Over trail, apparition in heavy

Cloud appertaining to pinnacle & peak.

Briefly, a bolt of fear, shock

Of my smallness. A landscape redolent

With varied lives reduces yours

Unto pinpoint, unto what I’d thought

Of as almost disappearance. But

That is the province of man. What is cyclical,

Spurred by fecundity & churn, what

Bears out the elemental, is beyond us. 

Our deaths at each other’s hands

A mockery of the world’s need & hunger. 

We craft lives in which your name

Erases with your small body. In which

The elemental cedes to flimsy 

Inventories of meaning. Maybe yours

Is a name iterative of its import,

Abdul. Maybe repeated in its repeating

The intransigence of life coupled 

With world, with world-awe, meaning

Preceding all naming. May it, wordless, 

Sing your name this morning. 


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