Seeing Poem by Rishma Dunlop

Oh my city, emerald
buried in ravines, coyotes
prowl your meridians,

I am writing from the road,
I had to see clearly
the single world

I could describe to you
the lemon groves, the beggared streets,
palaces of gold and marble.
All the cities I traveled
to sit in cafés,
to feel the underword of subways,
to see vanquished cities burned,
men and woman cradling the slain,
jilted sweethearts in every theatre,
to know
there is no consolation except in desire,
only the occasional small bird singing,
a temporary clearing of the disorder of things,
that flushes the throats of politicians and warriors,
pours a river of poetry through the larynx

In the city of the future
the world is bandaging its limbs
against wholesale murder,
bombed schoolyards.
From the crazed skulls of highrises,
needle towers on love's black sea,
the wind overturns someone's sail,
The city is a glass book.
Open it with an unflinching hand of
a severed arm.  Read the pages
to the lilt of a nightingale.

The sights and fires of
your streets are cleaved
to me. You stand immutable.
Beauty is in the coming home.

What is ordinary is not possible anymore.

Your towers rise in me.
A different wind turns the vane.
What I am waiting for
is just now being born.