Sitting on the rise of sand
re-taking the breath that had left you during
the sand storm, when your dune buggy sank as it was
buffetted by the winds, as you watched the windows
grow ever darker and thought about the next vehicle
where your parents were vainly watching their own
darkening windows, you clenched a taureg boy's
blue-tinged hands and couldn't say why you weren't
on fire
Now blue is the color of that lost breath you take in
sitting as the rise of sand over those whistling
machines, fading tea kettles where the water is the human life within
and the static sky recording where sixteen were buried is your
eye on new horrors every day, equally emphatic on distance
Those shaking attempts at deep breath you exhume the bodies
with from memory is interruption, fork from meal, as your
mind reluctantly turns to news captions, and every blink
the eye takes from those loses the face of loss, growing ever bluer
in the desert, a bright flowering of that dark plain, hunchbacked
with the sun rising on it in 1987 when you fell in love
with the whole human tribe while being buried indelibly alive.
