Shifting the rubble

Here’s another poem, Shifting the rubble, from my recent poetry collection Guerrilla Country, available from the publisher Flight of the Dragonfly Press.

Shifting the rubble

Were we to blame? To know, we’d have had
to go back to before it all began.
But everything was broken. We 
were victims now — hungry and cold;

and scavengers, each finding warmth 
and sustenance whereby we could;
unable to name who’d made us do______.
nor find the words for what we’d done.

Instead, we piled broken stones
and bricks where shops and homes had stood, 
lit fires with beams and window frames, 
swept clean the littered, pitted roads;

then formed an endless chain we handed 
debris, piece by piece, along 
unbid, returning every brick 
and stone to the pile we’d picked it from.

We paused, subdued, as convoys passed,
then walked the streets we’d cleared — and walked 
before — and stood to regard the ruins,
soaring, quiet; beautiful

in evening light: cathedral windows 
opening the sight of sky 
to sky; fragile memorials
to_______; 
                 
and wished them to subside.