Iron Rations

A time to rake; to search embers, for fingerprints and the scorched optics of the scattered and blind. After the violence, fagots, and reeds are heaped up into pyres, but first the sorting, the probing for trinkets of flesh. A silver crucifix, smutter tarnished, lays blackened by the avid impetus of quick flames, it is held up, by a tattered man of woe, he calls out: "I found something!" Death's archeologist huddle, wipe this soot-seared relic with sweat laced with new revealed sorrows. The recently threshed look upward, not down. dull eyed, they peer as though through the bottom of a fishbowl at the red and bloated afloat beneath an unblinking sky. These smithereens of mortality slowly bob in the ether, they wait for the hands of a meek fisherman to haul them in, to take them away.