stoned to death by her family near Mosul
I
and so it is
in the cool static rift of a charged particle
we once came, this uniformity of the earth's life
(ours) explained by a blue bolt of gods
entering some languishing primitive cell,
sparking it into mitosis, and, sexless, the cell
ever dividing into daughter and daughter,
into stone, into peacock, into angels of light
II
--all we have
become, or will be--
III
--and now the girl,
the naked lily-stems of her legs
against the torn black cloth, startling
even here, her battered face--what we want to call flower--
the trembling shade beneath our pale, reflected ones,
her shirt red or bloodied
and the little staccato of stones at her head--
IV
as if she were about our daughters,
the wind just barely channeling through the dark
labyrinths of their young bodies, their simple emptiness
wanting what? love rain cry of birds the first touch
of male palm against the budding nipple
what the living cell evolves for--
V
When the father who said kill her touched her harshly--
his hand that once held the mother, her nipples
between his teeth gentled, his seed
following the old genetic pathways the way seed does--
the torn tissue
of its blossoming already ordained toward the sky
even as the blind root splits the holy clay--
VI
did his daughter, tricked home, already know the story,
know what love can bring, has brought, the way Lot's wife did--
that one last forbidden look back
and her feet already crumbling into the shackling salt--
VII
in a marketplace somewhere near Mosul
this denouement: how many men with stones
striking us, striking that dark fragile place, their birthplace
made visible now, gossamer of all the fallen
like the iridescent eye of a peacock
mocking dusk--
that birthplace, that bald star of our newborn daughters
that arrives each time on this earth like first memory,
like first thought, first desire when the biblical rib
snapped clean and our wild paradise, ignorant and beautiful,
faltered