Stilled In The Shock Of It

by Suzann Kole

Twenty feet from a tiered ocean--
luminous and etched with
broken lines of opalescence,
a glinting from the west suffuses
the silhouetted dawn of children
with gaiety and gray gulls
who peck at the sand
standing in fingers of low tide and
swathed in residual summer.

Aggressive heat
and a blue incessant breeze
pleat into each other
in a prayer of rejoice and remorse.
Memory--the sweetest bitter of youth--
cannot compare to
the magnitude of terror and tumult
which wrecked and replayed this city
over and over
throughout its long night
of disbelief and disability.

Pipers twitter in the fine chards
of bone--an ungodly speed--
footing their way along the tide line; broken
and bonded by a citrine tincture
of wave. This balm of
shamanic brine wreaks
a havoc of sound: cacophonous
with the first flight: Canadian geese
defying the boarder
in a sonic collide.

An unrelenting beauty
tears across the eastern seaboard
as one, huge attenuated body
screaming:
a herniated urbane distortion--
the fundamental factions of
continental integrity, bloating
a distortion of ethnic belly
with wry insinuations
of national security.

My daughter weeps in
a repetition of inquiry, broken
by gasps for breath and brevity.
"Why do they show it over and over;"
the scorch of it over
and over her: a dark carcass--
infinity trapped in these steel moments;
blades of revenge circling the bureau;
your yellowed eyes pounding religious fervor
into these frail windows of revenge.
So susceptible to a motherland, are we
that rooted in our original civility?

Rushing between the decadence of large death
and the benign prick
of a damsel rose,
I am trying to masterclass the
critical inquiries of this sallow day.
Shallow words of bereavement:
a single drench of suicide
and the raw castigation of cultural infamy.
Correct me if I'm wrong--
if the day somehow denied me
a crimson deceit buried in this huge heart
Attack!!. Water and will;eddies
in a quick decay of emotion;
fractured peace presents
in labile decline. Notice:
the planes have begun to fly
again.