One came home from forced labor to collapsed bamboo, leaf rubble of his village, followed in grief a thread of happy memory to the field where, with rice baskets full beneath silken slaps of Buddhist pennants, the village picnicked. One found a stench, putrescent stews of naked women with their babes in open pits. Now this one's concierge of the bone tower. Like Genghis Khan's or Tamerlane's skull towers on the wind-raw plains of Asia, but cooped up in glass, this is a library of shelved brainboxes which look out blind to all compass points for others of their own kind. I photograph girls labeled prepubescent, but am tugged to the next shelf, labeled "Europeans," as one nods condolences. But eyeless, lipless, brought down to bone, I cannot mourn mine separately since we are every one the dead as we are every one the killers. The @3longan@1 tree, rummaging for bloom and fruit in blood-brewed earth beneath the pits, one day will shade picnics, banners, children scratching games in this dust, at play in the fields of where we all are one. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...TEARS IN SLEEP by LOUISE BOGAN THE DEBT by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR POEMS ON THE SLAVE TRADE: 6 by ROBERT SOUTHEY THE PHOENIX REBORN FROM ITS ASHES by LOUIS ARAGON THE VIERZIDE CHAIRS by WILLIAM BARNES |