With his hand on the Bible, words fell
easily of the shouts and broken windowpanes;
and the words of revolution
don’t quiet early in the morning hours,
they shatter sleeping towns and rattle
doorknobs by way of alarm;
the words are what roused him and ran together
in a confusing streak
like flattened swastikas.
Another cold war frozen in a still frame:
it was Stalin crunching angrily over snow,
it was the Gestapo in a ghetto, it was all the same.
Sarah Gajkowski-Hill lives in Houston with her husband and three children. She has been recently published in The Josephine Quarterly, Clementine Journal, and Amygdala.
A Quiet Courage 