Vincent Spina

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

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