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June 1st is the official start to the hurricane season, so far our family album is filled with names like Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike – they are all photographs of exile – this year we all hope for better. Tonight on the Magnolia Bridge, a Brazilian singer will play music and we’ll walk down there to listen to him. I will cast my wish to the water under the bridge that this year, 2009, we all are spared having to leave our homes.

after an apocalypse
China 2008

I
All public celebration is
canceled for three days
of mourning, but the trees
on nan hai da dao
can’t resist a confetti shower
after rain. They scatter
yellow rainbows where
we walk, remember
the dead but dance for
the living, shower
each going on
with flowers.
They have lived after
seasons of dying before.
They know ends
are fashioned from fragments
gathered in the shattered
middle of things that will not last.

2
after an apocalypse
we prepare for floods
we know all about gods
and promises

3
Five million is not as hard as one
who has taken shelter
under a walkway
that leads from an English garden
to a fortified high rise
promise of luxury.
Five million is a puzzle
for an engineer,
distant as a collapsing star,
a cipher in a book of equations,
a design problem in a textbook
for the next hundred-year storm.
One in shadows is an
other, undeniably
fragile as oneself.
One and one and one and one,
on and on and on and on.
Not five million.
Five million one
by one, every one
displaced, displacing.
See her and you are homeless as any buddha.

STEVEN SCHROEDER

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.