Dialogue With Sun and Poet

The sun is making arguments again
Today, its dappled chattering through leaves
persuades me that the world deserves reprieve.
You're dead, and though your subjects were contained

in poetry that sometimes flustered me—
I wanted to restore some order in
your fridge, to witness Palestinian
outrage somehow more dispassionately—

I see now it was you who rewrote me.
The sun refuses any compromise,
insisting on the beauty of its rays,
like you, illuminating how we're free

yet not. Democracies of bugs and sand,
fat kingdoms of the SUV, we're all
beneath what both of you, great fireballs
of life, have helped me better comprehend

as truth. It's June, too bright to be the end
of days that some foretell; the sun has more
to teach, and soldiers still have distant wars
they might imagine never starting. Instrument

of peace, this pen, I take,
the morning almost over now.
Flood the page with light, burn the house down,
is what you say. Arise. I understand.