Erecting Stones

January 2013

Here, in Congo Town, I'm picking up debris

from twenty years ago. Some remnants of bombs

and missile splinters, old pieces of shells from

the unknown past. A man strays into my yard,

wanting my old range and a fridge some wartime

squatters, passing through my home, did not take

away these twenty-two years, while my home floated

like a leaf, through the hands of mere strangers.

He will build coal grills for sale, but it is in the trash

that I'm searching for the past, searching for myself

in the debris of years past, and here, the upper

part of a cotton skirt suit, checkerboard fabric, black

and beige, size six, yes, that's me, those many years

ago, size six, high cheekbones, slender, sharp,

the losses we must gather from only memory.

But we're among the lucky, I tell myself as a former

neighbor stares at me, the new neighborhood

children, hollering around us. "I hear you're back,"

my once lost neighbor says, staring in awe that after

so long, we're still alive. "No we're not," I say.

"We're only picking up the broken pieces of the years,

erecting stones, so the future can live where we did not."

"Thank you, Mrs. Wesley, for coming back to us,"

he says. "We just buried Zayzay yesterday."

"You're still burying dead, over twenty years, still

digging and shoveling, to bury the young and early dead.

This is a country of ghosts," I say, "a country of ghosts."