Now We Are Beautiful

We were all once beautiful the way a curling leaf or surf-washed pebble is. The best eye-shades are spiral time-bombs. Song-birds tick like clocks when they are silent. Great grandmothers cook ghosts in kitchen pots and we are still here asking for more. Now bones remember their dust, the scratchy flakes of calcium under fire. Now we are beautiful once more, flames in ice-water. We gleam into the unseen waiting to be breathed into beauties last inferno.