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acrid green oil cakes,
    And tasted a cold extract of pine needles.
    I have stared at the flayed white trees
    And watched my children chasing a scrawny
    Cat through the streets at dawn, and smelled
    The dead cat boiling in my own kitchen.
    I have tried to relinquish judgment,
    To eat the cat or the dog without disgust.
    I have seen starved women begging for rations
    And starved men crawling under a frozen black
    Sun, and I have turned my back slowly.
    I have waited in a thousand lines for bread,
    But I won’t gouge at another human body;
    I won’t eat the sweet breasts of a murdered
    Woman, or the hacked thighs of a dying man.
    6
    After we burned the furniture and the books
    In the stove, we were always cold, always:
    But we got used to icicles in our chests.
    We got used to the fires falling from the sky
    At dusk, spreading across the scorched roofs.
    And we got used to the formula of edible
    Cellulose and cottonseed cakes and dry meal dust
    And a pinch of corn flour for our dark bread.
    We got used to our own stomachs bulging with air.
    And then one day the bodies started to appear
    Piled on the bright sleds of little children,
    Bundled up in thick curtains and torn sheets
    And old rags and sometimes even in newspapers.
    We saw the staircases jammed with corpses,
    The doorways and the dead-end alleys, and smelled
    A scent of turpentine hanging in the frosty air.
    We got used to leaving our dead unburied,
    Stacked like cordwood in the drifts of snow.
    7
    Somehow we lived with our empty stomachs
    And our ankles in chains, somehow we managed
    With a heavy iron collar wrapped tightly
    Around our necks. Sometimes the sun seemed
    Like a German bomber, or an air-raid warden,
    Or a common foot soldier speaking German.
    We saw houses that had been sliced in two
    From the attic to the cellar and large buildings
    That had been blown apart like small windows.
    We saw a soldier cradling a kneecap in his palms
    And children watching the soft red fluids
    Of their intestines flowing through their fingers.
    We saw a girl tearing out clumps of hair
    And surgeons who tried to scratch out their eyes
    Because they couldn’t stand to see their hands.
    Slowly we touched a sharp razor to our necks
    And scraped away the useless blue skin
    And the dead flesh. Somehow we lived.

4
Recovery
                             It was as if the rain could feel itself
                   falling through the air today, as if the air
        could actually feel its own dampness, the breeze
    could hear a familiar voice explaining the emptiness
        to the dark elms that swayed unconsciously along
                   the wet road, the elms that could still feel
                             their own branches glistening with rain.
                             It was as if the sky had imagined a morning
                   of indigos and pinks, mauves and reddish-browns.
        The smiling young nurse who helped you into the car
    was wearing two colorful ribbons in her auburn hair and
        somehow they looked precisely like ribbons gleaming
                   in the hair of a woman helping you into a car.
                             I believe I had never seen ribbons before.
                             And suddenly I was staring at asphalt
                   puddled with rainwater. And bluish letters
        purpling on a white sign. And sliding electric
    ENTRANCES & EXITS . And statues bristling with color.
        The yellow sunlight filtered through the clouds
                   and I believe I had never seen a street lamp
                             shimmer across a wavy puddle before.
                             The road home was slick with lights
                   and everything seemed to be