World AIDS Day 2006 – AIDS Memorial, Toronto

Cry

Morning through a city garden widens

its swath. Shiny eyes of cinquefoil,

azure eyes of myosotis, bruised lobelia

refuse to blink. Intruders trapped in the cross-

stare harden, crumble into fine

dustings because our sympathies

will not adapt to sun and cinquefoil: our world

steel and concrete, oil and song.

We hoist our lives high over the drone

of traffic and screwing gulls, hoist bags

of soil to terraces at the setbacks; set out

cinquefoil, watch its leavings, count

its days. Some days we doze in the sun

and dream we too are cinquefoil or lobelia,

blowing and blanching without demur.

Then pneumocystis breaks.

We open our eyes to that skyline we incised

and know as a jet cuts through cloud that

cities are our gardens, with their stench

and contagion and rage, our memory, our

sepals that will not endure

these waves of dying friends

without a cry.

Michael Lynch

1944-1991