Tenor

To break with the past
Or break the past with the past
The enormous car-packed
Parking lot flashes like a frozen body
Of water a paparazzi sea after take off
And because the pigeons laid eggs and could fly
Because the kittens could survive
Under the rubble wrapped
In shirts of the dead
And the half-empty school benches
Where each boy sits next
To his absence and holds him
In the space between two palms
Pressed to a face/
This world this hospice

Fady Joudah
“Tenor” first appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal and on Poetry Daily.