Closing down
Thoughts of morning landings
on some distant beach:
armed to tears
and wearing some forbidding
castle for a skin,
expecting noise and bullets,
time to slow, and stop, and grow
and then the death
of strangers and a strangeness
closing down your breath -
and then discovering
the fear
that ruled your childhood
and this foreign, adult blood
is worthless as all veils,
forever sold as hindrances to love.