Beirut

For two days my mother lies flat with pain.

The locusts have traveled far into her radio,

their bodies cast with boat-shaped tips

while not even our fingers stay together

to scull us from cities where salt water, years later,

will pour up the neck of each great live oak.

By transistor she hears the fall of Saigon

and Lebanon’s night-coins of bulleted light.

The radio needs almost nothing to pick up the world, she says.

She’ll wake to it, she’ll sleep to it,

she’ll tell it what she wishes.

As a child I’ll watch her turn

the small dome of the dial

in which many lives crowd

to transmit the yellowing conditions

of each country’s eye.

Lebanon of limestone, Lebanon of sheep,

for two days my mother lies flat.

On the third day

the goats of the Lebanese hills

tilt their heads, stop their feed and hear

an ancient city begin to break itself in half—

and half again—

and once more—

until the halves are dust

in which the olives will not fatten.

Only echoes grow from the limestone

as screeching birds carry

what sounds are human

to the white cliff to cry them out.

A human cry lives many lives.

The gulls are that fierceness made flesh.

For thirty years the people of my life lived.

Then thousands around me drowned.

Saigon, Phuket, Beirut, your gulls

flew over America and lent her your name:

If it is as Socrates says,

that locusts were human

until they heard the song of the world

and, so captured, forgot

to eat and drink and died—

and if it’s true the gods

took pity on the dead

enough to resurrect them

into ashen singing things—

then, so too, our songs

will have to be plagues.