Jericho

The earth has grown tired of us,

shrugs us off.

Port au Prince, Concepción, Padang,

Beichuan, Muzaffarabad—

we all live in Jericho’s walls,

and Joshua only the herald

of the land’s deep upheaval.

His trumpet calls to the bricks:

fall down. Not everyone can be saved.

I need poems, need them bad,

prays the dying man

in his hospital bed. We are all

saying our beads, one word

following another like steps across

a road in the moment before it rises,

before the gates come tumbling down.

as published in Terrain.org