I Will Taste What’s Left

I Will Taste What’s Left

In the orchard I lay my head down and look up through the branches.

The grass odors my clothes and my skin and I can smell its earth ground.

A jay with white under-plumage and blue wing tops blares over me in flight.

There’s a strange new day coming, and we will not know who we are.

Remember! exhortations will be lost.

The fascists will kill us, the fascist state will facilitate it, a devourer of its own.

I will be buried in the dug-up orchard with five thousand others like me.

For now the jay rips the air and flies over me from one apple tree to another.

- Anatol Cordua (2017)