To Beirut

ONWARD BISBEE, ONWARD BISBEE, FIGHT FOR THE RED AND GRAY. FIGHT FOR BISBEE, FIGHT FOR BISBEE, FIGHT AND WIN THIS GAME, RAH, RAH, RAH. ONWARD BISBEE, ONWARD BISBEE, LOYAL TO YOU'RE YOUR NAME, FIGHT BISBEE, FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT, AND WIN THIS GAME - Bisbee High School Fight Song

The night is all I have anymore
to remind me of the place before
and the one before that, these
crickets and last chirps,
the bold lighting at the field
down the street where people clutch
helmets and grist is gut-wrenched.
All my houses are darker than the wanton
feeling of known people doing lost things
forever in a web of light and then, frustration.
They are the strange recollections,
the healthy chorus of jobs and kinships,
so many who know their way home
in the dark and those they pass by.
The dimpled lights are buttons
in the hills, treacherous old-ghosts
in line drawings pinned tightly
to these walls of solemn grace,
this worldly prison and escape hatch.
It's a friendly nightmare with open lips
and adjacent stares, dressed-up windows
with faint botherings and flies,
mine are as bare as the shores.
There are no muezzin here, no handicaps
and the rest is a barren spree
without the differentiation
of the late purple sky of home
as she hangs her head down & cries.
The satellites blink slightly,
survey us down below and the moon
shows the daylight of the other side
where people sit closer together
under the fig trees and miss me
while I think of them until
the mountains turn into night once
more and the field goes dark. I leave
these lights off as if to say
I protest all of this, I protest
this absence and the recovery.
I cannot buy or sell anything,
I just accept and take and carry.
This is the hardest poverty I've ever known.