JANET I. BUCK
Scarlet Rain

When bombs left craters
in the streets like broken plates
with parts of people for their food.
When bodies seemed just tags clipped off
a brand new shirt still folded in a tissue prayer.
When certainty was a straw hut
lit in sorrow's rampant flame,
you told yourself among the screams,
it was, when all was said and done,
the juggernaut of a wartime waltz.

A baby was born in the back of a gutted bus
christened by the falling stars
of bullets finding target plots.
Her lace-stitched booties
seemed like veiled innocence.
Her father in a heap of blood.
An M-16 her first new toy.
Wooden slats of cradled hours,
blankets cross-stitched with her name,
nipples of a saxophone that
needed meat of music now.

Between the licks of terror's tongue
came cries of hope that
gave the wobbled table why?
a brand new set of fingerprints.
Painful joy, a scrapbook full
of could have been's
in cinders, fallen monuments.
Birth, the saddle sore of grief,
demanding love's deliverance.
A butterfly that breaks
thick seams of slimy caterpillar time,
emerging from the soot and dust
in sovereign rites of tenderness
uniting continents untied.
All we've crushed with mortar sticks
throwing wholeness on our cheeks -
gravel spray on sunlit roads -
a patch of grass around gray stone.