Day 237

There was a life that happened here.
People dancing, people sitting close together
so the camera could get them all into the picture:
A celebration of some sort, women
with their arms around each other’s waists.
Children sitting cross-legged on the floor.
There was music, food.  Spices
that grew in pots outside the windows.
People rose in the morning, walked to shops
to buy bread, fruit.  Their days were ordinary,
unremarkable.  They ate, talked, argued,
read a few pages before shutting the lights.
Their children slept; sometimes their feet 
slipped out of the blankets.
There were photographs we found of all
these things.  You can hold them up,
turn them, study them,
superimpose them on the ruins.  Number
the dead and the living. 
The unfound, the unburied.