Give you a name? Poem by Aurélia Lassaque

Give you a name when you dance in the dark with great hounds in empty streets?

Give you a name when you stroll to the river dressed for night in the glaring sun, spurning the men who were doomed the moment they thought they possessed you?

I'll offer you oranges
and to peel them a knife no bigger than a thumb
an ivory knife I'll steal when the battle is over
a dead man's gift to another woman
and you'll be bound to think of her, of her cold sheets, of the hole in her pocket
traded for the knife

I'll offer you blades of grass that cling to the soles of my feet
from shoots that grow there, where the bodies lie
standing tall as sentinels at the precise point their retreat ended