The Lucky Ones

It is, perhaps, morning, and let us imagine the sun
is just breaking over the dream-gray lids of dawn.
It is cold, in the morning, this time of year,
and the oak leaves turn their backs to the heat
slowly, like iguanas. See—there, where the woods end?

Where the trees taper down to scrubs and weeds
and finally the dense matte of grasses and wild
anemones: this is where you see it happening,
when you think about it. A mourning dove sings.
None of the bodies in the field still bleeds,

except the few left bruised and alive and strong
to dig the mass graves. The green is torn and flung
over their shoulders, and they scoop out earth
like pumpkin guts. Did they actually long for death,
these last few, and they threw down one by one

their children and women, their sickly old like crows,
or did they look nervously toward the soldiers, poised
like scarecrows with their guns in line? Did they seem
to them like something no longer human, like meat
without souls? The corpses were arranged in rows,

like large sardines. It was done; the pits were dug
while rifles warmed their long necks in the sun.
If they stared back over the hills to the distant
walls and homes of their town, we don’t know about it.
About half marched back, exhausted, through the mud.


(from The Arcana Fragments, ca. 2002)