Victims
from Stern Ornaments, page 1
Hetaira Press, Boston, 2003
ISBN 1-931002-28-2
$5
And so, beneath the grim headlines of crime or crash,
they gaze out from the family contributed pics (offerings)
as if they would speak and were stopped when they would explain
how all the weight of things — the cars, houses, papers,
weren’t enough to keep them ballasted, upright upon this spinning
globe,
how all the ties that bind — the parents, children, lovers, pets
could not so attach them as to prevent this separation;
how, the point of their outward looking expressions, your own life
that contains the sky and horizons, this moment’s length of hope
and history,
can, in an eye blink, become something that in a week’s time
is ashes, bones and other people’s memories.
You know, yellow newspapers, boxes of old photos.