After the Noise is Over: A War Poem

some days there was

cabbage soup or a

potato, other days,

nothing

we rose from the rubble,

from beneath basements,

(the big guns blackened, now, but cold,

after their red-hot efforts)

one wraith reaches for

another, stumbling

and where is my

husband, my brothers,

mother and father,

my baby of three weeks

the sky, stretching grey, above,

strangely quiet now,

holds no answers

landscape, man-made mountain of

broken stones, wind threading

through emptied building-shells,

winding through empty-paned spaces,

(no longer curtain-framed)

irregular forms casting their

shadows, the whine of

the wind says

they are

no more, no more, no more