The Night Our Troops Invade


Believing myself a citizen of peace,
I go outside to commune with the stars.
A handful, squeezed between tall dwellings,
blink, inscrutable as the Great Sphinx,
older than any human nation.

I wonder about all those dark years,
the millions of years light traveled
to reach my eyes at this very moment,
all the lives that rose and fell therein,
undocumented, ungrieved.

My reverie is broken by the eerie calls
of Cuckoos, nocturnal invaders,
parasitic birds who abandon their young
to the nests of other species,
devoid of basic maternal instinct.

The blinking stars, those blind historians,
beg this riddle: how we finite creatures,
lucky to have been given life in a universe
of infinite void, can fail to love every
being whose eyes reflect back into our own?




Lana Hechtman Ayers
(c) Lana Hechtman Ayers, 2006