With every death I search the boxes
for letters, photographs, anything
to refute the obliteration of flesh,
some proof that blood has flowed
and heart beaten. Last year
at this time, whole countries
existed that are no more.

I watch the news for the names,
fragments that have become
something else. To scissor the maps
into blues and yellows and pinks
would only make more chaos.
I cannot name the pieces
of this aftermath.
It is still the world
but not the world I know.

Leo Luke Marcello
from his book Nothing Grows in One Place Forever: Poems of a Sicilian American
Time Being Books, 1998

used by permission of the poet’s estate