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Not a whisper when we arrived, but a roar
there to greet us—two continents rubbing.
To yawn at the sight would have meant scrubbing
oneself from an outcrop along the shore,
we thought, so sure of the power that comes with size
here where enormities are said to collide.
We were being held, and the choice—suicide
or murder—was not ours to make: how one dies
and to what music, in what and whose interests,
can be composed beforehand but not willed.
What, with time, could we have thwarted
at the coast of what, where nothing rests.
The edge framed those who would be killed.
The coast aborted us, we aborted
the coast.
Brian Henry is author of Static & Snow and translator of Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices.
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