Benediction for a Bulldozer

May the bulldozers come for the home where I first crawled and stepped, young and teetering into the world (unbalanced), and where I pushed teeth from my jaw with a small tongue and tasted copper in the blood, and where the black dirt that fed the marigolds and azaleas was scrubbed out from under my fingernails, and where the salt came to my tongue (before the voice), and may the bulldozers reduce it to nothing.

May the wind howl and spin over the empty field that was once my childhood home, and may the pirouette of dust and sand and ash tumble down and fall silent to reveal that there is finally nothing there, not even the tracks of a bulldozer, to remind me of what was.

May this hollow heart of mine fill itself over and over and a thousand times over while this hollow field that was mine remains empty.

May I live in the house across from it and may I lift open the heavy window sash and hear the wind howl through the empty field’s big nothing, and may I be present in the recognition of what the bulldozer has done, and may I look at the past and say, finally, with ease, and in a voice as kind as a bulldozer, “It is gone.”