Lullaby
by Linda Dove
Every empire sings itself a lullaby.
—Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Many sacred things live in the woods of my childhood
where dreams go at night.
I said sacred but meant scared. The rabbits collect tears
on little leaves. They are the rabbits of history.
When they take our tears, they are acting as confiscators.
They refuse to let us have what we weep
to help us with our shame—not to keep us from it
but because we don’t have any.
We don’t understand. We think we are living quietly,
the way rabbits do, staying low and hidden
in the violets along the edges of things.
We don’t understand that rabbits do not seek
soft lives. Their bodies are made of fierceness
and scramble. Their throats are big with screaming.
None of the rabbit-hearts beat in the woods anymore.
They left the woods for fields so we could see
them coming through the bluestem like an invisible
thread pleating fabric. Yet we lull ourselves.
Yet we tell ourselves stories about soft things
that send us to sleep in the woods without heartbeats.
Linda Dove holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and is an award-winning poet of five books. Her work has been nominated for four Pushcarts, a Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, and two Best of the Nets. Despite a recent move to the east coast, she still teaches remotely at Woodbury University in Los Angeles, where she founded MORIA Literary Magazine.