Elegie
SING US A song of how things used to be in a land we once loved. Names of places long ago have become ghost whispers haunting your lips; you just don’t know them yet. Now is the time to sing louder. The living has forgotten how to honor us dead. We women have draped the spider-web gowns of yesterday, once jeweled with the diamonds of our futures, on our shoulders and on our daughters and their daughters. Rags now flap, almost astray, from our bones. The clothesline of our past lives swaying in the wind off Montreal River is made of the crimson that gives blood its bitter backbone. The ground we walked on simmered with dollar signs that soon dusted each new building erected in honor of our new religion. It was only a matter of digging. With the great might of metal claws digging dee
