CASSANDRA CAME TO SPEAK TO ME

This cold and cloudy morning
Cassandra came to speak to me
poor wild girl—words hurt her.

Her foreign accent hammers our vowels
into strangely shaped wings
that soar around the wind.

Her consonants sit on her lips
until she spits them out
in swift and angry gusts of wind.
​
Cassandra, I said, it is a crowded
and busy morning, I have no time
for you and all your stories.

The kids must go to school
with lunches, socks and clean teeth
I have bags to pack, a map to find.

Maps won’t help you when the sand moves,
she said. The women of Troy are empty and old.
Their husbands died with arrows on the walls.

Their sons bled with swords in the fields.
Have you not heard the birds
​circling over our city?