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Homs

Wind this morning 
so strong the borrowed Florida house shakes 
on its stilts over water.

White pelicans, which do not resemble the spirit, write their single sentence
straight through it, unhindered.
Their rowing wings dipped long ago into some ink -pot.

Rapacity doesn’t swerve before what it feasts on.

To a not-fish, a bird is beauty.
To a not-fish, hunger
wrings out its morning swim-towel and re-hangs it.

Yesterday’s Russian-drone taken video,
watched on computer:
window after window, glassless, glintless.

Apartment blocks, street lights, market squares past-plunged, deafened, unstoried.

Three incomprehensible men
look up,
wave at the camera from inside their shirts’ bright
         colors.

Around them, the no-longer city.
Its no-longer purses and breasts, esophagi,
cellphones, slippers, suppers.

No fish-teeming world nor its spiraling wings can 
        redeem this.

(No feather, shell, word, image redeem this.)