Absolution

A poem

In this space where I try to realize my sins were only survival, here, where the walls don’t breathe with the spirit of the people of the land who were wronged — it was a house on a site of forced surrender, the walls sighed with it — I can’t forgive the fire that burned it down I can’t forget how the earth trembled when I shook my fist, making it fall, and how after the quaking ceased, the waters rose to wash me away with my home And while over and over again I go back to die on that hill where the serpents slithered underneath the house, rattlesnakes always return to the place they were born to give birth Here where past the windows, resentment is not exhumed from the earth as I hoe my row, the reek seeping under panes, the fog is cleared, the structure is solid, and I realize how all is not in good order and never will be; we are all only responding to what’s wild I excuse my existence and the nature of all things human, and I am finally able to absolve myself