Day 328

Two brothers killed for no reason
except they were walking together
on a dusty road on a hot afternoon.
One had grown probably as tall
as he was going to grow, or nearly;
the other was younger; his parents
will never know how tall
he would have been.
I am thinking about the morning
of that day:  the way everyone there
knows any day could be
their last — any hour, any minute.
Yet the boys woke, dressed, went
together to wherever they went
to do whatever they did:
a makeshift school?  a soccer game?
And never returned.  What was returned
to their parents wasn’t even
bodies:  parts of bodies.
How understand that?  How to imagine
their last conversation, the one
they must have been in the middle of
when the bomb struck.