Somedays
I think of myself as
An unwanted souvenir
Left behind by death.

Grief, an artist,
has carved holes into me
Like a sculptor chips at stone-

In hopes of sculpting an angel.

Except,
This sculpture is not an angel.

This sculpture is broken in some places,
Cracked in others;
It is dusty and stuffed in the storage room
Of some museum.

Somedays
I can feel ghosts
climbing
into the caverns in my body.

Ghosts of the people
Who died without getting to see their family
Last year.
Ghosts of the children
whose spirits will
forever mourn
for a future unseen.

Ghosts of who we are,
Ghosts of who we could have been.

This sculpture is covered in bubble wrap
Because it is fragile.
It comes in a cardboard box,
A red, ‘handle-with-care’ sticker
Stuck on the front.

The cardboard box has no return address.

It is shipped
from one museum to another.
Always to a guest-house,
Never to a home.

Somedays I close my eyes
And listen to the flames
Licking at a corpse
On a funeral pyre.

I imagine the last words,
last breath,
Last smile
Of a person who adds to
An ever-growing number of deaths.

This is what a corpse is reduced to-
A number.

Maybe
Grief is easier to measure
When the people exist as numbers
Instead of people.

This sculpture will soon be discarded.

‘Too damaged’, the museum committee will declare.

So the sculpture will finally rest
In a graveyard full of other statues.
Cracked in some places,
Broken in others.

And maybe among the faces
Carved into stone,
This sculpture will find a piece
That fits its own hole.

Maybe the sculptures deemed damaged
By history
Will trade with each other
Until they are whole.

They will take
and give
and share
Until they forge a masterpiece
from what they have left.

Maybe the discarded sculptures
Will make homes in each other’s holes.

And millenia later,
A new generation will dig them up,
Display them in museums
And call them
‘Lessons from the past.’

Maybe our past looks down upon us,
and maybe our future will look down upon us,
but we- our present-
will look up to each other.

We will call each other survivors.