Bones - A poem

Bones



1.

Fifty-three years
to get to this point:
you and I,
the drive back
to your parent's home.

2.

I hold pencils and paper;
you carry their names
in your heart.

3.

When I was six,
you were nuclear
in your hole digging:
plunging your shovel
into the ground,
the world’s gone.

4.

Now, you carry
lists of bones
into cemeteries:
another attempt
to unearth the past,
put it back together
somehow.

5.

Did you know that,
like Dante’s exiled bones,
you were fought over
for years?

6.

Just as Francis Bacon
did with bloody meat,
you hung your emotions
and we were left
to trace in their names.

7.

When I was six,
I was afraid of the cemeteries:
both across the street,
and in our own house.

8.

Lifting a fallen tombstone
today, I disturbed the living
to re-place the dead.

9.

Names-
dirt, bones, tombstones:
all the same
in the end.

10.

Even as we near
the front door now,
all around us
the windows are rattling,
bones trying to break free.