My jaw still aches: 
a victim of war.
My tooth and root throb 
from incessant grinding

which will pass I am told – although
over there the bodies pile up,  
the score will be kept, 
the dead will fill the ledgers of woe.

The dentist tells me my teeth are fine. 
X-rays reveal no rot or ruined crowns.
She suggests I meditate and wear a mouth guard 
to seek relief.  I think to tell her about 

the dreams that wake me, the tangled sheets, 
my visions of hellscapes here after a great undoing, 
but I refrain when I see her calming green eyes 
fall to her own trembling hands.

                        

	After Jericho Brown Duplex

	Take these seeds and put them in your pocket so at least 
	sunflowers will grow when you lie down to die.
	An unidentified Ukrainian woman to a Russian soldier 
	patrolling her neighborhood.

What seeds will you carry in your pockets when you lie
down among the worms and fungi when you die? 

     Above ground we the living won’t comply
     with those who come here just to watch us die.

None of you will see our spring blue sky
nor the summer-yellow flowers’ blooms whose life

     is dead to eyes so glazed with winter’s bleak decline–
     those whose pockets carry orders they should defy.

Hold out your hand. Accept what I’ve planted in your mind.
Heed the part that knows we are of one tribe:

     the all of all who hunger love and cry,
     who plough the ground for seed, not flesh and flies.

What will grow from the breakdown of your life
depends on the seeds you carry when that time arrives.
                        

	“Cast in thy lot among us; let us all have one purse”
	Proverbs 1:14 as read by Sidney Poitier as Homer Smith 
	in Lilies of the Field

Three hundred-sixty-five days before
Sidney Poitier died, I’d gaped at the TV screen 
as white doves swept the air between 
the camera’s lens and the hordes who stormed the Capitol. 

In churches nearby, the faithful knelt for Epiphany, 
praised their Three Kings who – crowned in gold
and garbed in silken robes – shouldered past 
ragged shepherds and stood above a baby in a manger, 
bestowed Kingly Gifts on an infant who wanted nothing 
more than to nuzzle hungry into his mother’s breast.

Sidney P., as leading man in this scene, would have 
spread his arms over that babe, shooed away the Kings
and hummed lullabies with the shepherds. 

In the scene filmed in DC, he’d have stood before the Capitol 
held a mirror to the marauder’s garments, ask the MAGA men
to consider the lilies of the field, would have then spun 
stories of a real revolution where blackness became beauty 
in this land of white-hot shame, where an itinerant carpenter 
could preach wordless beatitudes to stone throwers. 

He would then move on from both – the crowded barn 
and the seething streets – singing “Amen” about the sleeping baby, 
“amen” about the marching men, “amen, amen, amen– 
sing it over” and over and over – even as the song 
was drowned out by the roaring. 

And here, a year later, I realize that the doves I saw 
were not doves.  They were gulls, scrounging 
the scraps the other scavengers left. Their mews and calls 
reminded me that after democracy dies, after Sidney P. 
is forgotten and his chapel dust, the Kings and keepers 
will still have their perfumes and gold to trade for favors 
and the rest of us will have what the gulls leave behind.