ANOTHER EMPIRE

It is Easter Sunday. A ruined egg on the pavement
reminds me; its scattered shell the blue tint of the virgin.
Girls in their pink dresses look ambiguous, swivel
their small hips to salsa, or lean from ground-floor windows,
blow kisses to each other, waiting for church.
Behind them in their darkened apartments, the immaculate corpse looks on, hung
from his cross above the solemn brown TV console,
its’ volume turned down.
In the park, on beaten stubble fields, families play soft ball, launch rockets from which white plastic statuettes of astronauts fall with parachutes back to the earth.
Children run to collect the remains. There is nothing simple in this.
Each event unfolds, small and cautious. Airplanes mark the sky
with their blue-etched trails. What is seen through the corner
window can seem as distant as a radio broadcast; can be us
or others. I see the slow smoke of restlessness,
momentum as its own song.