The Play

You said the play
  showed Icarus wings
  made of copper by the hands
  of his father to fly his angel/
  son over the sadness of soil
  blown dry and dying over the United
  States.  What year by reckoning?
  Twenty-one hundred summers after
  that one grape was crushed on the cross?

The actor said you could tell no more
of human history than the dirty jokes left by
the greeks, the roman war stories or
the grain yields of the curve of land
between two main rivers.  I say
ask the trees to tell you of loss,
how they missed the kinship of humans,
how many friends they no longer hear
and how they yearn for their dear ones to call their name.

~for krc