After the Spring Uprising

I came to campus thinking I’d see wreckage smoke

The hexagonal stones that constitute the path

Broken     on either side of which in winter lights

Suspend the trees between their lives and human life

Their branches floating     severed from their trunks by light

White     as a jacket in a picture of a man

Imprisoned in a jacket thinking     I would see

A any sign     I last night heard the helicopters

From inside three or four but outside saw it was

Just one one     hovering above my building thinking

They dragging them     the students from the library

They the police they would have what     deployed a tank

Too heavy for the     where the missionaries sang

The crossing     just beyond the trees     who haven’t sung

In years who sang before the campus gates were locked

They the police     they would have driven metal stakes through

The stones to     make a barrier the students couldn’t

Escape through do they do that no but if they don’t

Where do they do the things they do here now     I see

No students but     neat piles of dirt along the path

And people on their knees work silently between them