1
In the pit of refugees
a larger skeleton curves
a question mark around an infant,
etchings of a final clasp,
rib to rib.
Marks on her ulna and her teeth
show she was a slave girl
used to lifting too much,
eating too little.
Her gesture has worked its way
up to light again. Two lost ones
holding on, forever
a small prayer in bones.
2
She will not weep.
They held her father’s face
in the muddy trough
until his arms were still.
Her mother was chained
to the other women
and thrown in a cart.
The land she hated
since she was herded ashore
has begun to shove
walls and people and dogs
down to the boiling sea.
She wonders if death
is only what she has seen—
still and purpled flesh,
the eye that does not blink.
Her master’s child weeps
and pulls at her legs.
For a moment she recalls
how her own hand clenched
a brother’s wrist until
they broke her grip. She stoops
to lift the child
and turn to stone.
3
Perhaps the child was her own,
bastard of a favored son
or just the gatekeeper’s drunken whim.
Perhaps she fell in the press
of panic, unwilling to trust
the sea, unable to find
a place to stand. Her arms
reach for any comfort.
She scoops the child
to her belly. In the dark
heave of lava they are rolled
into silence.
4
This is the nature of dying.
We stand at the guardrail,
look into a polished case.
The remains are clear
as the tracks of dinosaurs.
A young woman. A child.
Embrace. Dead in the same
instant. We conjecture.
We walk on, glance back
to the place where others stand.
For centuries the dead
have not moved. First
the absolute density,
then the careful pick and shovel,
finally the cleaning for display.
What happens next is up to us-
forever a question to generations
or tossed again in a mutual pit?
The line moves forward.
Each of us takes home
a version of the pair.
We want to believe in love.
5
I am watching the first snow,
early this year, falling on
leaves not yet raked, white
on the burning reds and yellows.
In the blur of evening
I can believe this is both
the fire and its ashes,
a dim confusion as if time
arranges itself for metaphor.
But it is only an early snow,
nightfall, a season I have known
making itself new in variation.
Woman and child, I cannot know
the answer to your posture
any more than I can speak
to the stones buried in this night’s ashes.
But I lean close to the old
obsidian heart. I am listening.
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