It is the sands

                              of the pyramids.

                   One grain, then two, then whole stones, they melt.

                                 Their sharp, unlanded granules

                   drill from their homeless camps the far away dam.

                   The wind lifts them, gathers them in, and they ride

                              the red tide's maternal breast

         from their hulled earth rooms to their ghost of a promised land.

                              Stones fall, whole shoulders drop

                              from the Sphinx who was raised

                              by forced labor.  Eyes run

                   from their heads.  Scalps, halves of scalps rain down.

                              Melina, who once danced

                   at proms far from Beirut, laughed with my daughter

                   years after Hiroshima broke into flower, told

                   her beads in a church the Gulag never touched,

                              now pours down through our air

                   her young hands full with the seventeen pressed years

                              that are all she can hold

                              of spring: will the Dead Sea

                   grow fat with these fragments? 

                                Our mouths are being stuffed

                   with our sons and daughters, our centers plucked out

                              with tongs.  From our poor,

                              pressed through heat, through cold

                   over vents and gratings, flow simples, poultices, tinctures

                              to be forced into jars and sold.

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