|
| century |
| Sitting Bull's gone, |
| his era receding |
| like the last bus stop |
| in the neighborhood we once lived in |
| still forced look backward, |
| our seats never facing |
| where it is we are going. |
| The grand designs |
| have slowly crumbled, |
| like the Grand Central Stations -- |
| rows once breathlessly boarding trains |
| now abandoned for mute rows |
| of still-boarded windows |
| bricks, like social grandeur, crumbling, |
| manifest destiny's rails rust, |
| spraypaint, urban ivy, the silent testimonial |
| of our anonymous self-assessment. |
| Does the shattered brick dust |
| of the Berlin Wall |
| hold the ashes of Auschwitz |
| in obscuring embrace |
| and beg its forgiveness |
| saying "now I've avenged you"?, |
| while Bosnia, new-resurrected next door |
| plants new-found skulls |
| for its second new century, |
| some still lying obscured in the |
| shadow of the Great Wall |
| that falls on Tiennaman Square |
| in the shape of a tank-tread? |
| The Trail of Tears is a freeway now, |
| its fading souvenir-stands sway |
| with their harvest of beads. |
| Will we replay forever |
| our dreams and nightmares |
| in snowblind pixels of HDTV and VHS/C |
| that chill us to narrated awareness, |
| numbing the stabs of our second sin |
| committed over and over again? |
| Which of our DNA will turn evidence, |
| and in which of our peers |
| will we find the eyes of the jury? |
| © Jon Bohrn (2000) |
