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| Nocturnal Sunrise by Alison Strange-Green |
The angels at Pere Lachaise Cemetery
weep this morning,
tears glued frozen to classic features,
wings unable to fly.
They are mourning the dead journalists
who were too saucy with cartoons,
lambasting the prophet
when thousands die under drones
in trenched caverns in Syria.
One man's religion is not
another man's feast to roast and ride
when children and women drop
at weddings and in small cells.
The angels light the graves
of Oscar Wilde and the French Resistance,
stones shining above snow
and then they retreat
to melancholy for this season of violence,
wings bent down with grief.
Carolyn Gregory's poems and essays on music have been published in American Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, Bellowing Ark, Seattle Review, and Stylus. She was featured in For Lovers and Other Losses. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poetry in 2011 and is a past recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award. Her book, Open Letters, was published by Windmill Editions in 2009 and her next, Facing the Music, in 2012. She has been working on a series about the history of guns in America for several years now.