Dreaming the End of War

from The Fourth Dream: Families and Flags and Revenge

My niece, thirteen years old,
shot in the back of the head, executed
in some barbaric ritual. For years
I’ve fought thinking of her final seconds,
what she must have thought, prayed for,
if she begged please at the hour of her death.
Without the unwelcome intervention
of these bastards, today she would be
a woman. She might be a mother, might be
holding a son in her arms like her mother
held her. They have never caught
the men who killed this girl, this girl who
scarred my sister’s heart, this girl who
lit our family’s flame as if we were a candle
that belonged only on the altar
that was her face.


Once,
I dreamed I found these men. I woke
searching for a gun, could feel
the spit in my throat. I knew
that spit to be the only weapon
I could call my own.


I cannot say what I would
say or feel or do if these men, these sons
of bitches who live on with the blood
of my blood on their hands
were caught, prosecuted, found
guilty, sentenced to death, injected
with something more elegant
than bullets in our own graceless ritual
of revenge. I do not know what kind
of river would run through me
as I saw their limp bodies lying
there like the slaughtered
deer of my childhood, killed
by the state in my name.
Killed by the state in the name of my sister’s
grief, in the name of my mother’s tears,
in the name of that awful day when
rage cut through a household like
a pair of scissors cutting up the sun
leaving us all in a darkness
whose cold shadow we still feel
even in the warmest days of summer.