Gomel Chesed

I watched hoards of children gag themselves with rags,

silenced for a generation,

rabid, shivering, silently cloaking themselves with dead bodies

in deep waters at dusk where the whispers ooze

tar that coats their faces-

we crawled backward through marching soldiers,

prodding their ears with bloodied fingers,

searching for a source, sources,

the source that traps us in the veins of asphalt-

we floated through rivers, swam against and with rivers,

grasped to the bottom of rivers and drowned in rivers, & now

the rivers are thirsty for light that huddles beyond the sodden limbs-

we rolled through deserts numbed by sounds of voices

that told us to keep looking,

thinking we had found the source,

here’s the source, take this to find the source,

remember the source and cradle the source,

and the source hovered above us,

laughing, thundering through the canyons

and stinging us with tufts of spit-

we held our blisters to the moon

and our sores recorded the star’s maps,

and the maps showed us that at night

we dream of towers collapsing into dust,

and that springs gush at the bottom of the smoke

Molly