When a people abandon their town they take their names with them but leave their dead behind. Coming after, we exhume both site and dead but may only rename their rooms. Adults they buried outside their walls, children beneath the floors to be underfoot all day in talk between loom and metate. At night they lay down with the dead on the other side of the blanket of earth. All the rooms we have ever built finally hold no more than these bereft of all inhabitants but a purple quilting of wild aster and the small bones of a family. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SMALL COUNTRIES by JAMES GALVIN TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON DAT GAL O' MINE by JAMES WELDON JOHNSON CRITIC AND POET by EMMA LAZARUS IN THE JEWISH SYNAGOGUE AT NEWPORT by EMMA LAZARUS |