George Ellenbogen - by the execution wall the villagers say

these houses have been flattened sixteen times
by eight dynasties, civil war, a humorist,
two earthquakes and a plague. It may have been
an earthquake and two plagues. Still

on Sunday, after service, bread scent
spices morning air, chants hover
above the church dome, descend
on ancestors in the churchyard.

To remind us. Donkeys in response scuff
cobblestones cratered twenty years ago,
heehawing past a stone wall, swishing
at flies copulating on their backs.

The history of these monuments is worn
to the stone: dates, buried bone, weathered,
ivied over; records shelved
in the museum’s basement

where a librarian and local drunk squint
at scripts of accusations, trials, staged
for this wall, altar for resurrection
to spring fresh tulips out of dung

which fade. But one oak persists
through concrete, like grass holding
its place despite invading armies
trudging through two millennia.

The oak still rises, arranges the flight
of barn swallows, hovers over wisteria,
children who rub its bark, feel it grow
with them through cacophonies of gunfire.