Sonnet with Double Reed Pipe

Double-piped aulos, reed in the mouth
of the goddess— when music fails her
and wrath instead spills out, someone is bound 
to be punished. Isn't that the way those on the lower 
rungs  have always been betrayed by the reach of some 
bloated or corporate power? As if it were transgression 
or sin to sit at the same table, drink from the same water 
fountain; learn the language of your colonizer, take back 
harvest and fruit, lands they claimed in the name of nothing 
but their own unfettered hunger. Streams wind 
through the fields, gurgling in protest and witness: 
how bodies made a dark undercurrent of music still 
audible to every attentive ear; how skins were flayed 
from rebellious bodies, how bodies belled from the trees.