[draft:
Star Trek Poems]
Let That Be Your Last Battlefield
the levees, riven, couldn’t restand water—
hope, never again constrained
in any single heart. there was bounty,
but now borderless, cracked desert
where two scavengers violate eyeshot,
gazes brazing one another.
unable to reckon distance, or signals
of hands flailing, they rush
and slam in the haze. clawing,
bared teeth. ragged clothes don’t sort them,
nor carriage. conquest, taboo, armistice,
eroded them into reflection.
generations have stripped the ground
of rocks, spent cartridges, shrapnel—
felled every improbable tree for spears,
uprooted their stumps for fires.
gray-eye-to-gray-eye, bronzed-fist-to-bronzed-fist,
even a small blades' comfort—lost.
canteen dry, rucksack empty, holes for pockets—
all worth taking, had been.
if for certain, he’d killed
a kinsmen, he might grasp remorse,
but here, alone, all drift as fog, across
faint dusk and the desert which sees less rain.