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Poem: Autumn Aubade

Do not grieve the piecemeal leaves: they say: for unto dying: the homeless shall survive: the laborers discover innocence: the minorities one with the whole rhyme of America: dear misshapen leaves: leaves who are wholly our people: torn from the skeleton: is your heaven unto dying in the blackening compost: the ample soil scorched beneath each schoolchild's footpaths?: an ambulance emerges from the whimsical smoke: what war today?: an apple-cheeked reporter on the beat breathes her purple lips into the microphone: she wants to calm us down into a well-quaffed America: just close enough to the scene of the accident to glimpse the caress of a torch song sunset's shadows cascading down a burnt sienna building: to not leave the Capra geography: a quartz pane separates us from savagery: a eulogy of names on glossy ebony: not the nightmare but an attempt to distill truth from rubble: disrobed: de-boned: essentials we clutched on to as immigrants: across the Bering Strait: on the Mayflower: into Ellis Island: ships with African slaves lashed to mold-laden racks: boat people from eastern Europe: from Asia: that even in the urgency of an escape into entry a river bordering Mexico laps frothily into a shoreline shimmering beyond disbelief: a river can grin: the harbors of sidewalks swell with leaves: acres of tawny-blue with reddish-tan: gutters full of pilgrims: soldiers in Vietnam: in Gettysburg: who never left their battlefield to comprehend how a heart can break so easily: that the depth of the voice of a formally handsome white gentleman in his mid-sixties may funnel our soliloquies into sound bites: approval ratings: election returns: a country as divided as two attorneys who always find pies halved unequally: a couple braves the chilled cemetery air: one is sobbing into a plaid green-orange handkerchief: the other refuses to look up from that gravestone: how could they help themselves?: the winter confronts their dignity.