The first betrayal:
parents piled and hauled away,
dead wood on a sled,
claimed by illness
before war had a chance.
Bullets sang past the soup line.
You staggered under the kettle’s burden,
crying, I have bones.
Still the door did not open.
Shrapnel-marked,
you drifted through nightmares
of hospitals, strangeness,
floating away from life.
You crossed an ocean.
A family gave you
the name and age
of its dead child.
You crawled into the lap
of the silent mother.
Her stone body taught you
the lesson in a new language,
shards of childhood
bleeding into that black place.
Opaque eyes see only
a grey wasteland.
