A Day At The Morgue And After Poem by Cheryl L. DaytecYañgot

They arrived bundled up in white cloths.
Or rather what used to be white cloths
now smeared with the hardened blood
of champions of righteousness,
and mud from the appalled earth
on which they, defenseless, slumped,
as breath was suctioned from their bodies
in a situation officially called
by the baptismal name
Encounter.
An innocuous name,
unable to spell guilt,
claiming no victims – only heroes.

She saw the corpses laid out
In the morgue
So detached from having cradled
cadavers a thousand too many.
The face of one was too gruesome a sight
even for the blind;
Perforated, gaping
Like a mouth desperate to say something
But stuck in silence
Nonetheless saying the message
Better
Without the words.
She counted puncture wounds
Imminent to each other in the chest:
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen…
Overwhelmed by a sundry of ice pick work,
she concentrated on depth-
The caverns were so deep
Even buoyant thought could drown
As hers were sucked out by sorrow.
Loud colors suppliant for attention
Deep violet, light violet, reddish purple,
Yellowish purple, gangrenous yellow…
The doom of these deaths overshadowed all
she had seen. And she had seen many.
Someone in the room cried.
It could have been her soul;
Or one dead man’s brother with yellow jacket
who smashed the concrete wall with his clenched fist.
Dense, angry grief cleaved to the air
Suppressing the stench of formaldehyde.

In the aftershock, her thought swam back
to the surface
Tired. Angry.
The killers’ swivel chairs have been upgraded
for well-done punctures like charbroiled steak.
Truth once more has been chained;
Falsehood holds the whip.
And the bodies are rotting
In graves, restless from injustice
But not at all puzzled

For this is just routine.

(12 August 2006)