Bring Back the Dead

translators of crystal. The inheritors

of glass who discovered fire.

The children who live under the blanket

of ash which powders their roofs,

who draw buckets of oil from wells

to capture the moon in the reflection.

They see the sky as a mirror—

the earth molded from their own

hammered little bodies.

From the corners of our plots and tombs—

for death is to the future as age is to illness

and youth, catalogued all the same.

A book lays in silent rigor.

Its skin stale, its soul still

to the wind.