UFOs

Many have said they’ve seen
a delta shaped object
lined with lights
over their suburban heads

I think
it was
a grand and terrible ghost
embodied as the Mississippi Delta
come to haunt them

Witch pyres as steady as planets
rimmed the shores
and the unknown flowed down from within

They say

“I don’t know what it was”

They lie
to themselves

for deep within they know that neither the future
nor the extraterrestrial world
brought these triangles of dread
to the space above their heads

Instead
memories
of dead history
forgotten languages
rapes and suppression
negation and killing

came back to remind everyone
that all the slaving
and pillage
of many generations
do not simply disappear

but rise into the common ether
and hover
most often unseen
but always there

legacies
in the night

making selected random
viewers
think of genocide
and send their children inside
to hide
while they shiver in the air
outside their handsome
stolen homes
and living standards
wondering at the beings
who have stolen their surety

a true reparation
for history’s extravagant misuse
of darker beings:

the replication
of fear in the bellies
of those who have not paid it
enough heed