Beyond
Lisa Bourbeau
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For those who survived the atrocity that was Mariupol,
and for those who did not …itself, the black and formless gray of it, the broken open shattered shut that beats and beats and beats its thumbs into the never end of it, the frozen songlessness and crumpled last lost dance of it, the counts of melted snowflakes…. Count the disappeared. Iron ore, now purified, pounded back to earth. No hands to braid the bread, no golden wheat. Even the gulls that formed you gone, gone the tongues that swam through syllables like fish. And adrift in the white clouds that crowd the burnt sky, a longing for a plum, a kiss from the salted wind, or this -- a final unread book clasped close, each page a child, each child a page, unturned.. |