Seventy-Fourth Birthday

What is new? I've been mortal all

my life. It's only that now I suspect

where I have lived is where I live.

Ancestors are many layers deep,

too deep, too many for me to count.

A voice in the cool of evening searches

through a faulted garden. It nags

at the eroding gravestones: "What

was your crime?" "We were for many years

alive but at last got caught."