At a Bosnian library studded with grenades,
an archivist is shot in the back
handing a volume down a book brigade.
Curling, blackened paper; charred thought.
The whispers of ages crisp and whistle in the flames:
a bill of sale, a sermon, a dispatch for the troops,
the love note of a voice slain again.
Fire licks the scrawls of writers felled by bullets
or in their beds, cleaning out their joy and rage
and sweeping their musings into ashes of oblivion.
Civic speeches flare with chemistry texts,
illustrated prayers glow beside invoices,
and the courtship letters of husband and wife,
buried side by side, ignite with desert tales of lust--
all erased by the match's sandy flint,
crimson like a pencil's rubber end.
The inferno gorges on phrases
and commits them
back to the earth which once bore their authors all alike--
wordless, with the inarticulate scream of birth.
Published in Out of Words, The College of St. Scholastica, vol. 8 Spring 2004