Winter pronounces another nest dead & we teethe good grief
like sightless puppies memorizing the world taste-first. Good grief,

have you heard? An empire is less a failed scholar of history
than it is a diligent concubine of forgetting. Old news. Good grief,

liberals demur at the picket line / protest / vigil, I’m not responsible
for the bad stuff happening somewhere else. What good’s grief

that fails to earn resurrection? Dawn raids & riot cops negotiate
the immutable parameters of life. Comrades nurse their good griefs

like a child that’s born starved. Still sparrows demonstrate their living
over roadkilled brethren, announcing without reserve the good grief

of what they survived & didn’t. Wingbeats a syncopated missive:
we were impossible before we were. We who mobilize for good, grief

-striken as any border, we hatching variegated revolutions, we dying
-in at arms factories, transcribing with each action a good grief

that maps us—steadfast as the sun—toward a future close enough
to drink from today. Sing no justice, no peace. Water a true good: grief

that refuses silence. In the republic of memory, we defy annihilation
with this torch borrowed from uprisings past & ever-present: a good / grief

we pass hand to hand beneath an unoccupied sky where birds
do their ancestral work — a path aglow with all our good, good grief.