When the fire came
it warmed their skin
right off their bones,
baking their young muscular anatomies
as you might bake a chicken in the oven,
slow
until the ligaments
turned soft and brown,
like some makeshift cremation
stopped too soon.
And you, you who raised them
you the one that made them
stood and watched their walking
now rolling now not human
not quite alive bodies thrasing
as a fish does
against the hard metal hook
writhing and twitching
like some injured animal
turned mad by its own mortality;
and you, you stood silent
waiting for gravity
to pull them down to you.


And now, sixty years now
since our bombs buried your children
I slide across you on this train
sliding across you sixty years now
since men bled their lives
out onto you, out into you,
taking their last breaths
in your fields
before their eyes
closed like curtains
and would not be brought back up again.

My history forgot them, you see,
though I find that you did not;
you've kept them beneath you
as a mother cradles her children,
growing over their torn and broken bodies
as to keep them for yourself,
as to keep them from us
who see only skeletons.

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