A Look at Gravity and the New American Psyche

               Understanding Gravity

We who look for god in the heavens
Are showered with body parts, fragments
And serial numbers that kept track
Of Columbia’s movements through the sky
Written in ciphers and genetic code
Destined to help our aging parents
Think, walk, and remember
History’s arc, as we do, in sharp
Grammar and uncluttered syntax
Taking gravity for granted as we
Moon walkers have done
Trivialized in a liquid two-step
binary stutter that occupies
ground zero of the primitive
frontal lobe that places
imagination within an arm’s reach
or within the wretched ego sphere
so Columbia’s rise and fall
a projection of national vanity
or punishment by another god
a payback for America chasing
an unholy new frontier
built on the backs of first dwellers
rising like the Twin Towers over Manhattan
vulnerable in the wind to the cavemen
using flint and box cutters to bring a dream
to its knees, who for an instant assign
moon walking to the dustbin of history
buried deep in fine-grained Arabian sand
a morgue for an 11th century end-game
forced inside the Muslim psyche 
like a medieval drama of black and white
demons fighting to purify the word
cover the feminine and stop the hour
glass that now is turned on its head
again, clock ticking, the new brain
that can decipher old documents
calling for piety and the fist
and still fly high, burdened only
by memory and mortality
as if we had invented gravity
for the very first time
and mourn all who have fallen
from the early morning sky
slowing our gait to a crawl.