November Sixth

It’s no solace that November’s 

glacial light has polished the morning 

to a silvered gleam—the sun has risen 

over countless terrible things, 

made mirrors of autumn’s floods, burned 

scarlet through the smoking scrub, 

pierced rifts in the rubble, glazed 

the brows of men bloated on glory at the 

helms of our wayward nations. I suppose 

the numbers say this place is only 

half terrible—half beautiful and half 

terrible like two faces of the same coin, 

two hemispheres of the same world, one

in shadow, the other struck radiant by

the day's first glancing sun. I know I should 

lose my mind over the coppered oaks,

the gilded locusts, but the bombs keep
falling and for every sweet thing, a gun.