When, for once in your life,

          you're permitted to wish,

and you trek in, out of the scrub,

and line up and wait, with your secret-

shy, like a child-as if it might somehow

be okay to start things again;

and your wish,

with all the creased wishes

of those who have waited with you,

are taken away in blue crates

and then sharpened to knives;

the dust that is home to your footsteps,

the dry, rustling leaves of the sky,

narrowed to furrows and stains

on a butcher's-block map-

so that what you know now of your land

is that cleavers love bone:

the blade striking home

through the thigh of your daughter;

the moonlight of idiot metal

slicing through memory's kiss-

what you see's

how your wish was mistaken:

that thin bird of light

which had danced on the foreigner's tongue

was just history, at play.