Meditation on Remembering, Or a Golden Shovel for Sappho and Breonna Taylor
        Cy Twombly, Untitled (To Sappho) (1976)

As if life itself were rung like
rain from the evening air—drenched in a
mist of what's missing: a hyacinth
in gray scale or windy gaps in
the erased spaces where the
dotted line of lineated mountains
once stood. I imagine your poems—trampled
and hoof-hewn, rent and riven by
a great beast not even the godlike shepherds
could contain. How. Then. Now. Once. Until.
Nothing is ever wholly whole. We are only
that which survives, even in our absence, like a
a night sky the sinking sun streaks with purple.
How to say in a poem that Breonna Taylor's death is a stain
on a country, yes, but also on history? Tell me: what remains?
What endures beyond the blurred words of men on
duty? In office? You once wrote: Those I treat well are the
ones who most of all harm me. O lost ones: I ask to end with any word but ground.

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from Bennington Review
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