Contributor Series 7: The Confessional Diary of Bone
Bones
By Michael Ceraolo
the bones of a few billion passenger pigeons,
once present in flocks dense enough to darken the sky
for eight continuous hours,
hunted
to extinction in less than a century
And
the bones of fifty million bison,
skulls stacked several stories high
while awaiting some human use to be fund,
being bleached in the sun all the while,
hunted
to the brink of extinction during the span of a half-century
And
the bones of untold fish sloating up on shore,
killed by man-created eutrophication
and
the bones of the countless thousands
(millions?)
killed in wildfires
started, or made worse, by man’s hand
And
the bones of those in your locality,
your own backyard even,
killed
during man’s expansion over the centuries,
awaiting your uncovering
Michael’s poem Shakespearean Baseball Sonnet #25 appeared at vox poetica in September.
