After

Say it one more time
That lovely thing inside
Green hills and your hand
Villages in the distance
We shall never go
Call back your kindness
The wonderful newness
A blue sky pierced by your lens
Old stone steps you walked
You captured our history
Fragrant life of painful loss
No lecture could explain
Where grass grew long after
We were dead and gone
And all that promise
Swept away as scattered atoms
No one else the whole world over
Has any knowledge of our dust
And all that might have been