Blades open the earth, with a smell
like blood or bread rubbed to crumbs.

News of my darkening country has me
thinking of poets slaughtered by tyrants,

of Mandelshtam, Lorca, Miklós Radnóti,
and poems from prison and from exile,

Nâzım Hikmet, Liao Yiwu, Dennis Brutus.
Their arrest warrants cringe for shame of the same

graceless brute’s signature. The punctured walls
close their eyes and brace for another wave of lead.

Come summer, when the cornfield simmers
in braided tassels, would I dare unravel myself,

as a beaten book frees letters from its pages,
or the flossy, seeded syllables of milkweed fluff.

Don’t lie, I want to shout at someone, torture is
never for information, always for the pleasure

of the torturer, or to stamp the state on a body,
which is the same thing. Then a raw gust

tosses gulls above the plowed furrows
where they have come to pluck

small soft bodies, and shrieking
they hold themselves stiffly in place,

beating against the wind, working
hard not to be blown backward.

They believe the world can be good, so I tap
the car horn and raise a fist in solidarity
with the six or seven teenagers, all of them
white, in T-shirts and shorts, gathered safely

on the corner by the hardware, each holding
a hand-lettered, cardboard sign: Equality Now!,
or No Justice, No Peace, or a photograph
of the black man murdered down south by the forces

of order. A couple of them wave in response,
proud to be taking a stand, and I am nearly felled
by the intensity of what I must call love
and a cutting grief for their faith in all of us.

What do they expect will happen now?
They have never seen the grimy abattoirs
of the cities, and surely there is closer wrong,
always and even here, in our northern town

of a thousand souls, but I won’t let you call this
the self-regarding theatre of lovely gesture
or conclude that I am talking about futility.
People walk past. People drive past.

Customers go in and out of the hardware,
and the softest breeze of an early June afternoon
brushes the heat of the sun from the protesters’
pale legs, from arms yet untanned after the chill of spring.