The wars come

and the young men die

and the women write poems

to clean up

after every war,

and collate them,

and press them

into books made of wise,

eighteenth century French covers.

And the men were wrong,

dead wrong.

And the women were right,

living and right.

But the next war comes,

raining bombs and poems,

and the collections grow,

whole libraries

of words and bodies,

under the turning knives of light.

Blood and sonnets,

living truth

and broken teeth,

the stacks crammed

with flesh and visions

we never learned what to do with.

Sean Lause teaches courses in Shakespeare, The American Short Story, Literature and the Holocaust, and Speech at Rhodes State College in Lima, Ohio. His work has appeared in The Mid-American Review, The Minnesota Review, Poetry International, River Oak Review, Struggle, The Blue Collar Review, The Mother Earth International, European Judaism, and The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry.

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