Terror, tonight
Is the moon
Slipping from a rat’s gray grasp,
Finding its way back
Into the sky, which is America—
A white moon
Leaning on the night’s neck
With its hands in its pocket,
Moon hung calm above
Catastrophe, the police
Breaking the neck of a man
Who had just brushed summer’s
First bead of rain from his eye-
Lashes. Who—knocking a Newport
Against a wrist, watching smoke
Break its head against a brick
Wall—is preparing to die
Unaware they are preparing to die.
Heavy the moon, silly the tasking
Of a rat with delaying death.
Terror, tonight
Is the candor of the earth
Where someone is preparing to die
And the earth receives that dying
With its hands in its pockets.
And the moon that once burnt the silk
Hump of a rat, back in the sky.
And my daughter hiding in the rose
Bushes, asking who, who the sirens
Have come to kill. And someone calling
It beautiful—summer, moon—
And someone dying beneath that beauty,
Which is America.