Christopher Bernard will be reading at the Poets for Palestine SF Marathon Reading at Bird and Beckett Bookstore. For a donation of any amount to the Middle East Children’s Alliance, poets can come and read at any time at the store on October 14th, Indigenous People’s Day. Please feel welcome to sign up here or email poetsforpalestinesf@gmail.com to be scheduled.
A Day in October
A child holds his breath
like a frightened pet to his chest.
*
His eye peers through a hole
in the wall of his night room,
in the acid dust of siege
and cage of bone and blood,
in the code of an algorithm
governing AI
that has made the ineluctable
decision he shall die.
*
His eye, brown as honey,
watches you, intently.
*
It is like the eye in a castle wall
where hungry defenders await the burning
arrow vaulting through a sky
dark as velvet,
to break a mother’s shield
and wipe her tears with ashes
*
and build in pillars of fire
a school where future terrorists
(according to the omniscient
and infallible AI),
are learning, even now, their alphabet.
*
_____
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist. His book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2021 and was named one of 2021’s “Top 100 Indie Books.”