by Heather H. Thomas
“Reflected Autumn Light 2 Photograph” by Catherine Lottes
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If I say I love god and hate my brother, I must be a liar. Roots protrude over knots of weeds and wildflowers overgrowing the path to the old bench: knife scars. Initials dotted with bird shit. Today the ceasefire ended. Bombs resumed falling on crowded hospitals where the attacker says the enemy hides command centers that must be destroyed. The water’s green-black gloss. Slanted sun flares across it, flashes onto trees. Angled, the sun doubles its reflection, blinding me. For a second my face turns up to the sky glaring down. If I cannot love my brother whom I have seen, how can I love god whom I have not seen? Quickly I turn away. My eyes burn. Behind them the sun repeats on my eyelids, retina, optic nerve. The riverbank is bathed in golden shimmers, shaking the leaves, making old branches dance. Pockets of air vibrate without breeze or wind, shaking me. Shifting reflections fracture into prisms of light flowing far away to the rubble, the dead, the injured, the taken, shaking every stripped-open heart that’s part of it all, the pulsing downstream, the cross-stream ripple, the light refracted in this instant, as if the river upended and we were all under water.
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Heather H. Thomas is the author of Vortex Street (FutureCycle Press, 2018), and six other poetry collections. Her work has won awards from the Joy Harjo Prize, the Rita Dove Prize, and the Academy of American Poets, among others. Barrow Street; Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts; Pedestal Magazine; and The Wallace Stevens Journal have published her recent work. Widely anthologized, Heather's poems are translated into six languages, including Arabic. She lives along the Schuylkill River in Reading, Pennsylvania, and has taught creative writing for many years.
"If I cannot love my brother whom I have seen, how can I love god whom I have not seen?" god? has anything to do with any of this ... god is safely locked away, but greed carries the bombs ...