Litany (In New York): A Poem For Bono—By PJ

Litany (In New York): A Poem For Bono

PJ DeGenaro

For Bono on his birthday

In New York, she saw the clouds retreat across the skyline.

She had never thought much about living in a triangle

Whose points were major airports. Not until she learned to hear

The roaring silence of jets that weren’t there.

She pushed the stroller under a careless blue sky.

In New York, the neighbors’ boys crashed their bikes again

And again into towers of flame-colored leaves, and

Leaves, like embers, sifted down to the baby’s blanket.

She watched the baby’s eyes; caught the moment he learned

That brightness sometimes falls from the sky.

In New York, awake in milky haze, she saw him on the news:

The center of a blur of firemen, of cops, of billowing flags.

The bravest, the finest. He called on them to join him in song.

Beneath the black hair, his face had turned older, harder,

The prow of a beautiful ship, sharpened by the elements.

His voice was warm and solid as an arm

Draped over her shoulder. In her youth she could deny him,

But in the fullness of motherhood and fresh fear she understood

That he was the template, the wellspring,

The godhead of what she would always have to love.

In New York, in the unwritten future, she would think of him often.

Tragedy had marked him, stalked him, tailed him

From his boyhood home and on his path through the world.

He would appear again and again,

Framed against a backdrop of bombed buildings,

Or laying a wreath for the dead

On a street, at a theater, on a fresh mass grave.

His sharp beauty would yield to sorrow and grim lines—

But his smile opened always like a sunflower

Against the careless blue sky.

Bono 2.0—By Kelly