Here they are:
the fruits of 
our long and dirty labor

falling from their trees,
hitting the ground as rotten
as the heartwood that fed them.

When they break,
they will split, expose
their mush, stink.

It’s up to us
to rake them all up,
burn them, salt the ground

where they grew,
cut down sprouts,
end this. Of course

there can be no promise
that no missed seeds
will fall to the ground

to grow again
into a poisonous
stranglehold

on what we hold dear,
but we must put hope aside
as a luxury until

we’ve fulfilled the hope
that those who came before
put into us. This 

is our job.  These 
are our fruits, reeking
of us and our inattention

and lax oversight. Until
we atone and set our garden 
right, what right do we have to hope?

A thick blanket of chaos
falls upon the holy fires
consuming our city on the hill,
seeking a way to extinguish them;

we wake to mouthfuls of
robin feathers choking us
as we struggle in a bath of scalding air,
tortured by unbearable skin; we strip ourselves

of all objects metallic right down
to ancient fillings in our teeth;
we shift our church altars to the worship
of ice; we love each other from afar

in an effort to stay unmelted; watch
our unknown neighbors swell
with superheated air and rise,
sky lanterns celebrating immolation,

falling to earth in unknown places,
setting new fires in distant towns;
we can’t bother with those screaming beyond us;
we can’t bother to pick the stems

of those feathers from our mouths so
we swallow them as we do so much
else, knowing they will pierce us
like our bigotry from inside our deepest guts,

setting us to bleed boiling 
into our farthest crevices; a thick blanket
of chaos like a wool combed with spikes and 
the nails of dying children; in all this

the only hope left is that we drown soon
or suffocate in the steam of a rising ocean
that will bring the birds back in with it;
swooping over the last scraps of the old

conflagration, their feathers
coated in both mourning
and morning, exalting
as they grieve that our flesh

is no tender feast,
that we’re roasted to leather
as they swoop, seeking places
to nest in the wreckage

of our city on the hill.

A revolution will only come

when our children can kneel
among trees and remain still
as they are pelted from above
with falling acorns, nuts, fruits,
and cones, chanting the beat
of the earth upon them.

It will come when
they can kneel on shore,
shivering, soaking
in the rush of surf, shouting
the ecstasy of the sea upon them.

It will come when they can kneel
before each other,
look into broken eyes
both like and unlike their own,
saying nothing, rising
to embrace their opposites
and weep in their arms.

It will come
when they can
disown us utterly. 

It will come
when we are unable to stop them
from stepping away from us
toward the greater good.

It will come
when they fail us more joyfully
than we have failed them.