For Bilal Mohammed Kamal Hamdan, Age 0
See how it works, Bilal? I will Try salvage slivered beauty from The extant world, find the burr In whorl of unbroken fingerprint. I have only the mineral world Unadorned with need of metaphor– Incapable of gyring unto balance, Harmonized calamity, or calumny Come manifest. It is yours. Your family’s. I keen like tern Sheers over ocean but cannot Alight on any branch you see. Do I let my stranger’s grief colonize Your dying this way, Bilal? There is nothing in it of possession. I see capillary wave, pulse of Torsion spilling shores. I hear Echo, ripple muted. I think Of rhizomes humming underfoot & want our surging histories Entangled that way– not in periodic Stuttering patterns of bomb-fall & rimfire– in our thrumming instead, Our vital animal yearning. Could I clasp your hand under-soil, where Root ends & the world begins Under bannered names anew? I sing your name this morning, My fingernails clutched beneath T...