Fury Psalm 8:
Let the labor of mourning bear its fruit already and cease
The cupped sighs, the salt in the throat
Let kaddish and threnody bed down with milk thistle
For its wounding yields purgation and gentility
Let it come forth with its vertigo and migraine remedy
Handling the black and green lozenges like the parts of a body
Let what the light teaches map dendrite and breath tracks
Let the foot not be punctured by sow thistle as it departs the grave
Let its thistle down yield sustenance to the goldfinches. Let it
Creep away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress
Let the method for calling up ghosts be an appendix to ordinary time
For no language is neutral, asking, “What will we become?”
And does not answer, “how to come forth from her stone
and the star thistle, oyster thistle, stones that we are”
Surely all who are locked in boxes should have their hands held
Surely they should fly out of them into the Lord’s mouth.
Surely she should not be locked in.