Bomber Dump, Massacre
BOMBER DUMP
This is the graveyard of air.
A sixty-year-old ghost wind
Streams from their tails
Like blown hair in a mural.
Tilted like dead dragon flies,
It's a boy's wreckage.
He makes throat-engine noises,
Tilts outstretched arms and nosedives.
In the far gardens of his mind,
The bombardier planted flowers
Of crumping detonations,
And his night maps bloomed.
There was no instrument on board
To measure the height of innocence
From target to bombardier. Nothing here
To measure the groundspeed of creeping ivy.
MASSACRE
After the small wars and folded flags,
After the winning stopped, piles of the dead,
Their half-lidded eyes pasted with sky,
Lay beneath trees that sighed odors of meat.
From afar, it seemed they rested there
After a practice resurrection, tired now
From that long earth swim upwards,
Entrance wounds closing like punctures
In rising dough, machine gunned girls
Restarting their pregnancies like stalled
Engines kicking over. But this resurrection,
Only a little one, should not have clothed them
So poorly, the rags and flesh almost one.
They seemed shamed to be among us, adding weight
To their death, pressed closer to burial
And refused to be judged under any sky
That could never penetrate those eyes again.
