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.
Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2023
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