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FURTHER READING
Poems About Tragedy and Grief
A Litany
by Gregory Orr
Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100
by Martín Espada
Easter 1916
by W. B. Yeats
Facing It
by Yusef Komunyakaa
Hum
by Ann Lauterbach
I measure every Grief I meet (561)
by Emily Dickinson
In Louisiana
by Albert Bigelow Paine
Memorial Day for the War Dead
by Yehuda Amichai
Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Richard Cory
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden
Stillbirth
by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
The Second Coming
by W. B. Yeats
The Stolen Child
by W. B. Yeats
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Assault to Abjury  
by Raymond McDaniel

Rain commenced, and wind did.

A crippled ship slid ashore.

Our swimmer's limbs went heavy.

The sand had been flattened.

The primary dune, the secondary dune, both leveled.

The maritime forest, extracted.

Every yard of the shore was shocked with jellyfish. 

The blue pillow of the man o' war empty in the afterlight.

The threads of the jellyfish, spent.

Disaster weirdly neatened the beach. 

We cultivated the debris field.

Castaway trash, our treasure.

Jewel box, spoon ring, sack of rock candy. 

A bicycle exoskeleton without wheels, grasshopper green.

Our dead ten speed.

We rested in red mangrove and sheltered in sheets. 

Our bruises blushed backwards, our blisters did.

is it true is it true

God help us we tried to stay shattered but we just got better.

We grew adept, we caught the fish as they fled.

We skinned the fish, our knife clicked like an edict.

We were harmed, and then we healed.



From Saltwater Empire by Raymond McDaniel. Copyright © 2008 by Raymond McDaniel. Published by Coffee House Press. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
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