on a crumpled up paper,
dug up from the ground
you can still make out faint lines
that spell a single word,
“Av”

and our recurring death
demands we
the great grandparent
and great, great aunt
and great, great, great uncle-less

we, who have replaced our tears with lumps of flesh and dirt
who have climbed into the lines of
Kaddish’s ancient murmur
drawing out our grief
as the clank of g-d’s peculiar shovel

(the ones before us dreamt of ploughshares but were instead, handed early graves and a generational digging whose hole still grows)

we are, inescapably
insufferably, in and around
“Av.”

to go back to the tree our first ancestor planted
and to pull out life that has been waiting there in the ground.

this, is all there is.
and ever could be.

the desert graveyard undone by the unsuspecting secret of seeds.