I suppose that there are places I can go
to find official protocol today
but out here at the shoreline the truth is not so fixed
and I always must rely on my own sense.
I start the morning praying to the sun
and watching as the birds flow into clouds
to glean the mood I need to represent,
the expression from the one to all its parts
for the village always acts on what I show,
it guides its rhythms by the cloth I call
and I could draw it half-mast on any day
the soldiers who are dying, the way the world's disintegrating,
yet graveyards are but part of how we live
and there is such a thing as too much crying
so I must bravely fly the colors high
most every day, despite the silent we can't honor.
At the same time, why let death get in the way
when birds can fly past bones in search of worms?
The living have secured a sacred space
and death must keep its messengers at bay,
except when I am tasked with days like this,
when the circles within circles turn around
and cannot shake the loss of what's familiar,
something even now we have forgotten,
but that is what our grief becomes at last
knowing that we never saw what once was there.
