by Ruth Roach Pierson
Like a foxhound let loose on the hunt,
all afternoon she bounded from exhibit
to exhibit, bending, sniffing, gathering
names for a garden. Sweet Woodruff,
Chocolate Ruffles, Globe Blue Spruce.
Now, back home, chopping carrots
and coriander in her kitchen, she hears
a radio voice threaten shock and awe.
Trembling Aspen, Alocasia. A barrage
of Tomahawk missiles and bunker busters –
thundering down. Mountain Fire.
The hollow premise Halcyon Hosta:
it’ll all be over Dark Star Coleus
in a roar, a flash.
But in the aftermath of the aftershock,
after sands shroud the gouges tanks
chewed in roads, after victors, drunk
on imperium, lounge in the defeated leader’s
gilded palaces, after smoke ceases to plume
from the ruins of Basra, Karbala, Kirkuk:
for the truck-borne women and children
shot dead at a checkpoint, for the shrapnel
-scarred, the toddler amputees, what
sweet thereafter on the banks of the Tigris?
