The airports became their own museums,
the echoes of all our hurried strides dying
away to the sounds of birds nested under the ceilings.
The seaports, quiet since the dinosaur cranes came
to rest, drew families out where tall weeds bloomed
from the widening cracks in the asphalt and cement.
The skies were serene as they’d been in those long-ago
days after the twin tower attacks, but this time
it lasted, and we, faces out of our masks,
looking up from the high grass and spreading trees
of the cemeteries after that long season’s culling,
able to hear the sad silence of peace,
we held hands and sang soft rounds of what comforts
we believed might benefit our dead, songs
of how the coughing storm had subsided, abated,
left sea sky and land at last less overheated, less
smoke in the air we had to breathe, the deep
purples and reds returned to the coral beds.
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Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and four chapbooks. Recent poems appear in Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Tinderbox, and elsewhere. He edits poetry for Bracken.
Photograph of clear canals in Venice, Italy.
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