This cold and cloudy morning

Cassandra came to speak to me

poor wild girl—words hurt her.

Her foreign accent hammers our vowels

into strangely shaped wings

that soar around the wind.

Her consonants sit on her lips

until she spits them out

in swift and angry gusts of wind.

Cassandra, I said, it is a crowded

and busy morning, I have no time

for you and all your stories.

The kids must go to school

with lunches, socks and clean teeth

I have bags to pack, a map to find.

Maps won’t help you when the sand moves,

she said. The women of Troy are empty and old.

Their husbands died with arrows on the walls.

Their sons bled with swords in the fields.

Have you not heard the birds

circling over our city?