The bones exposed
have long since
given up the fight
for who they were.
That shattered femur
rests anonymous among
assorted shoulder blades
and other shins that
may or may not
make a whole.
Death is here
a black abstraction
of totalled deaths,
of numbered grave pits
and variations on the theme
of barbarism.
Massacre sites
scroll down the mind
in litany—a soundless chant
of lanes and streets and factories
and white bones broken.
It takes that iron nail
embedded in a skull
to loose their screams
and it takes the tiny shells
of water snails,
crept among the dead,
to release the stench
of the slushy river shallows
where they died.
Most of all, it takes
the bronze footprints
of those who did not die,
to keep on walking,
as stubborn testament
to their names and lives
and being down all
the white bone years.