blindness

Because you are sitting at the same seat
at the same corner in the same pocket
of the universe, the angle is the same.
Unless you try to see.
Or ask the breeze, brushing momentarily
at the broad banana leaves, for a lift.
Gina comes over from New York,
bandana, chemotherapy, shaking hands
and all.  She wanted to see the aftermath.
A childhood in an entire city sluiced down.
And talks about a kind of seeing.
Even from an ocean and two breadths away.
Even with an IV, these days she's reading
little known memoirs of wars, what is kept.
Still as political as ever, against an enemy
headless and constant.
Confronted, rewritten, killed, and revived. 
An ongoing battle until one sees the other
dead.  How her hand shakes now,
holding a pen, her sword.  And her insistent
voice grown hoarse.  The indefatigable.
Because unlike fiction characters, you and she 
are real, are weathered now by the constant 
confronting and writing---no matter where 
you sit or what corner in the country-like 
universe you go, the seeing will exact its toll.
But no matter now.
Merlie the poet returns after an exile
to her island home.  You promise her a visit.
And Gina, Gina has taken her flight.