Empires rise and fall
in the blink of an eye,
if your timepiece is vast enough,
expansive enough to engulf
the struggles of humans in the act
of constructing and destroying that
which they have built ….

I crunch this apple
from New York’s fabled orchards
thinking of the tower
where my mother told my father
that if every light in the city
were to go dim in that very second,
she would marry him, after all,
and how the blackout came so quickly,
unexpectedly, in quiet of the summer night,
almost as suddenly as the day she left,
with all lights blazing in her trail.

Memories are constructed
piece by piece, bit by bit;
They become hazy with the years,
so that what we remember we heard
is not necessary what we heard,
only what we remember,
and empires, and families, have fallen apart
on misunderstandings and fables
much worse than that.