Craters
The question is to yourself.
The ghosts are silent. This could have been
a place to package meat products; that,
a schoolhouse. The craters are indifferent.
They appear as if fallen from the sky
—concave splatters pocking the landscape.
Curiously my mind turns to an egg:
the concave shape of the yoke
floating on a white saucer…nutritious,
life-giving. The image passes. As if
all the earth’s pulsing, breathing matter
had been vomited to the surface
to fester in the spring sun: and now,
this absence, a mockery of a mock-up
of what was. Nothing to surprise us:
one more building—hospital…car factory—
lost to the horizon.
On more march of dying children
pushing rock-piles of loss
through a dreamscape of the ultimate dream…
What to do with these rocks? I fill my pockets.
They bulge and I sink. I pass along
the outskirts of each crater-pocked city
and place one there, exactly there,
one among many. Each one silent.
Each one, a grief