During the protests.

James Matthew Wilson

  We praise the clink of dinner plates
  Stirring in evening suds, and thank
  You for the snow's settling weight
  That turns the dark limbs still and blank.
  A friendly sort of love, this stillness;
  A pleasant peace, quotidian motions,
  And in their twilit meeting we'll bless
  The hour with our iced oblations.
  But on the screen stream curious pictures
  Of tanks mobbed in the desert square,
  Their cannon draped with bodies: thick, sure
  Men, shouting, hungry--over there.
  We talk of lunch and laundry, not
  To plumb the pleasures of distraction,
  But prudent toward an order that
  Sustains though not our satisfaction:
  To train our hunger it gives rest
  By freeing us of the stomach's worrying.
  My wife's weight to my side is pressed
  As we watch what elsewhere's occurring.
  Could a day come when all is peace?
  Not from the fullness of the table
  That drowses in each evening's ease;
  Not just the stop of war, however stable

  And preferable as that may sound.
  For, far-flung chaos, present order
  Must find their last food somewhere, ground
  Their acts beyond some distant border.
  It's for that land we thank You, know
  The taste of it within our mouths,
  The figure of it in the snow,
  And in the desert rage, its drought.