Diaspora

Michael Jewell

We live in a luxury hotel, supplied
with everything we want. Still, we go looking
for our neighbors whose names have been
crossed out. We phone their numbers
without getting through and find their
apartments deserted. No one knows
where they went. They left
suddenly one night

after an unexplained disturbance.
An official with a clipboard takes down
our complaints, but the missing
do not return to claim their furniture,
which is quietly sold off,
or their clothes, boxed up
and given to charity.

Their picture frames are broken, the glass
in splinters where their photographs 
have been forcibly removed.
We wait for rumors to circulate,
assigning blame or indulging
in speculation, and are surprised
at the silence. Business

continues as usual, the dictates
of a perfectly packaged universe denying 
that an active volcano lies beneath us,
spilling over after dark. In the heat
of summer the National Guard
keeps watch as the city smolders.
Where starlings roost, they fall
and scatter like ash,

and we sift for meaning in the debris.
Making shadow creatures with our hands,
we call them messengers from God,
and we want to claim sanctuary
from persecution, as we twirl
helplessly in the current.
The boatman, or the assassin
points to the sky

and speaks in an angel's voice. He takes us
down the river that has no bridges,
the leaves which float on the surface 
turning under as we pass.
He leads us through a country
of stunted trees, where the water
goes brackish and disappears

into parched earth, and we follow the dry
riverbed to reach the remains of a temple,
its tumbled pillars exposed to the air
like the bones of prehistoric creatures
preserved by desert sand. 
We endure the ranting
of a madman

for the secrets he promises to reveal,
that behind the wasteland that consumes
all it touches there exists a land of plenty.
Among partially excavated foundations
ancient seeds begin to sprout 
with the rain, and the weak
are no longer hunted.