One man built a ladder

of stacked up black bones

to climb the living dead

to rise above his own salvation.

He wanted muscle and limbs

blood and wombs, wanted to reach

above the dark soil to become a god


But his mouth was a scar

and his chest a deep hole

there was no heart in him.


The scar and the hole

carried him through

the great war that was

a cleaving. He fell through

a door in the earth, fell

straight through the unhealed

line of history.


The black bones heard his cries

bellowing across the dry husk

of fields and the scar led his two feet

across the broken stalks and the rocks.


His voice was what the children

heard in their dreams, those sold

off, far from their mother’s breast.

His voice was the beast that

growled behind the lightning

and the cold that rained down

from the sky.


And the men, whose bones

he picked, and the women, whose

marrow he sucked, wailed his

name in the wind. And the sound

filled the air above the old stone

monuments, as if a song and a prayer

were paths their lives could follow

back to land.


And the children, blessed children

the arm babies and the knee ones,

the not quite lost their baby fat ones

shimmered in the air, drifting like

black dandelion seedlings

above the red dust.


Once on the cobblestone path

along the river, I heard a terrible moan

and I stood back to see what the dead

might bring, but no sorrow walked

out of the dark water.


No weeping of rotted flesh

or clumps of pain-soaked hair

no haints shining like a prophet

climbing from the river banks

with a vision too unholy to tell.


Instead, driftwood, an old tree

bent like an outstretched hand

hope floating across the waters.

The future traveled

past the endless journey of fear

ancestors calling from the deep

returning from the far reaches

where men once dreamed the world flat

and time dreamed it round again.