by Brent Christianson

Listening to the President Threaten War

        Silence is an ocean
       Speech is a river
              --Rumi

Effluent speech
raves
wave after wave.
Words float
with broken branches
bloated bodies
in the stream
into the river
through the delta
into the sea
sinking
deep in the ocean.
The ocean silence
of dead empires.

-originally published 2004 in Out of Line