Day 335

The children go walking through charred fields.
Their legs are thin, they tire more quickly
than they did only months ago.  They are remembering
when there were strawberries, watermelons,
zucchini.  They speak about them as though
they were lost friends:  the texture, the sweetness,
the smell of the house with zucchini roasting in oil
and garlic.  Can’t you almost taste it? one
of them asks the others; and the others
nod, lick their lips, look out
over the ravaged grasses, blackened earth,
and see, for a moment, fields of abundant red and green.