Swiftly, swiftly
The tide travels
Licking and rising
Here, there
At Cuban beaches
At Iraqi deserts
At Vietnamese jungles
At Afghanistan's hills
At Gaza's crowded alleys
At Yemeni mountains
At Donbass villages
At Baghdad's slums.
Looking for a breach
Looking for a fissure
And where it is turned back
It moves elsewhere
To try again.
Overhead the blood moon
Immune
Draws the tide, commands it,
But the blood moon's orbit
Shrinks
Decays
The hungry ocean awaits it
The vengeful desert
The patient hills.
Copyright B Purkayastha 2021
(I dreamt the first lines of this poem, woke at 4 am, and wrote the rest before I forgot. Good job, too, because I didn't remember a word of it later.)
