Burial Sight
Barefoot and naked,
not yet two years old,
the waif of our love, she took
into the field behind the barn.
There bound, hand and foot,
upon the cold damp sod,
she knelt it - knowing eyes,
filling with hurt and fear,
turned toward her -;
there the muzzle placed,
tight against its neck's nape,
close under the repository
of all that was and
might once have been.
Then, 'to save her soul',
slowly, deliberately,
inexorably, that
awful August afternoon,
she, the unrelenting trigger,
squeezed.
"Yet each 'man' kills the thing 'he' loves,
May all by this be heard,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave 'man' with a sword."
Worse still she left the corpse,
ligature marks livid,
in the grass for me
to stumble upon
when I returned
in the weeks following.
Flesh of my flesh,
soul of my soul,
heart of my heart,
life of my life,
had then jelled and run:
generations of maggots,
housed in the collapsing husk,
had fed on the remains and flown.
Little now remains
to mark the spot
where the self-righteous
anti-abortionist
slew the child
of our love.
Breath and flesh long gone,
scattered by scavengers,
the tiny bones have
powdered in the woods;
the depressions in the earth
no longer impress passersby,
oblivious to the horrors
felt and done that day.
Yet now and again,
she returns to the spot
to revisit the scene,
to nudge the vision
of the vanished corpse
with the toe of her boot:
here lay an arm that held,
there fingers that felt,
feet that danced,
eyes that saw,
heart that heard
but dared not speak.
It's done and gone. Let it be.
February, 1999
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