When it comes to this awful knowing
I must freshen my trust in stardeath --

the efficiency of gas and dust after.
Shared information at cell-level

keeps us both trapped in pain: yours
renders hope without justice.

In the absence of matter, virtue
dissolves. Decades too soon the taste

in your mouth putrefaction, organ by organ
and slow. I never even saw that hat-tree

hung with bloodfood wheeled beside you.
None of us were there. Under this

an ache to be the wordless nursemaid
who could crawl in beside you

and engulf you in a generosity of flesh.
Instead we are knotted as barbed wire,

pulled curtains our permanent backdrop.
Your last day frightens me more

than my own. Let us look for the strange
bronze heads, obscure in sacrificial layers --

they could tell us our interpretations
were all mistaken. You are the one

who doesn’t hide, you never
left: why should you leave us now.

Trummerfrauen (“Ruins Women” or “Rubble Women”): the title of a famous World War II photograph, by Sam Wagenaar, of kerchiefed, destitute women poking through the bombed-out ruins of Cologne.

strange bronze heads: mysterious colossal figures recently unearthed in Sanxingdin in north China, in a province formerly assumed to be a barbaric backwater during the Bronze Age. They and other findings are forcing a re-writing of history.

Susan Zielinski is from Dansville, New York and now lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

 Susan

 Zielinski