This absence.
Everywhere, the vanished
fallen, the land not marked
where they fell. Cold ash. The seasons
passing swiftly now, uninterrupted—they seem
to have flattened all
but the glacial hills. Something once fashioned
by hands has been found now and then, outliving
those hands. Ladle, needle, broken
blade. Don’t name it,
where small fires have gone out,
broth grown cold and dried
to film, the air emptied of stories
and of the men’s voices telling them
in whispers, those nights passed in stealth
and watchfulness, under the cover
of no moon. In the nearby villages
the women removed their petticoats and tore them
into tourniquets. Don’t call it
the waiting—beneath blank sky,
beside the cauldrons of water hauled up
to the hearths, the makeshift wards….
Limbo. Those nights, the ground grew
porous, ready to receive the dead
and the irrevocably harmed–the women felt
the clutch of something. The years
to come. This absence
of whole, living men who left
what they could—locks of hair, portraits
that froze them unsmiling,
names to be slipped between
the names of newborns.
