Paper Window Poem by Erwin Maramat

Must have seen you in a field,
the trampled grass your bed,
your eyes fixed on the sky,
and the sky hanging on blooming fire
and leaves of ashes eloping with autumn-tainted summer.
You didn't stir,
if not for the fence time drove into the paper soil in between us the song of chaos will probably sing it's ominous song in my ears.
Not an inch, did you move.

Your thoughts might have been that of your mama, on her porch steps for the hundreds of dinner that waited cold for you that year.
Your papa must have passed a ball to a glove without a hand to hold it up.
Your dear Anna must have been trembling as her heart skipped a beat reading letters written open-endedly.
The hills around you stood mortally wounded, weeping for their trees, still you slept in between those pages while your home collected dust on the shelves that so few of us care to visit.

Still your eyes were fixed on the sky. Unmoved by clouds. Unperturbed by dying sunshine. Shards and shrapnel of ideas burrowing deeper. I knew your lips wanted to part and utter wilting words, perhaps the heaviest word to bear—goodbye.

War has always been indifferent to life.