The Shawl.

The Shawl.

I touch the fabric

Feel the texture between my fingers

The weft gently snagging

On whorls of skin

The wonder of it

The tingle of memory

A sorrowed veil

That even now

After so many years

Still comes and goes.

How many times do we hear

The platitudes

Before they sink to the bottom

To fester in the stench

About our feet

The filth of our disease

The miasma of falsehoods

We create to hold us to the past

We are bound, in repetition

Mindless in recreation

Rites of passage

Barely understood as bondage.

More than a millennia

Thousands of generations

A call to faith

A determination to bow

And scrape,

Cow tow.

Doffing caps and forelocks

Worship as a device

If it works

Why break it?

Keep the flame and carry the torch forever

Eternal,

In the name of some peripatetic god

Or other. Oh, brother.

Even on a distant planet

Having escaped the flood

Man will carry

The seeds of their destruction

The worship

The bigotry

The idolatry

The meaning is never clear

But the result is the same

Follow the leader

Blindly do we go

Straight over the top

Into oblivion.

Generals and monarchs

A dictator is just a step away

From a holocaust.

Even as I smooth the folded shawl

I remember her smell,

The sound of breathing in the weave

And the sigh

Of leaving.

There is no god worthy of her name

Or any of the lost.