Whose Eyes Are Flowers

The disasters numb within us, caught in the chest, rolling in the brain like pebbles
The feeling resembles lumps of raw dough, weighing down a child's stomach on baking day

Or Rilke said it, "My heart:
Could I say of it, it overflows with bitterness
But no, as though its contents were simply balled into formless lumps, thus do I carry it about"
The same war continues

We have breathed the grits of it in all our lives
Our lungs are pocked with it, the mucous membrane of our dreams coated with it
The imagination filmed over with the gray filth of it
The knowledge that humankind; delicate man
Whose flesh responds to a caress, whose eyes are flowers that perceive the stars
Whose music excels the music of birds, whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs
Whose understanding manifests designs fairer than the spider's most intricate web

Still turns without surprise, with mere regret
To the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies
Transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments
Implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys

We are the humans, men who can make;
Whose language imagines mercy, lovingkindness
Believed one another, mirrored forms of a God we felt as good

Who do these acts, who convince ourselves it is necessary
These acts are done to our own flesh
Burned human flesh is smelling in Vietnam as I write

Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space in our bodies along with all we go on knowing of joy, of love

Our nerve filaments twitch with its presence day and night
Nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying
Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have