From The Grave They Will Rise

Farmhands smacked their tongues in burnt air, sweat slid along their brows, down as sweltering sunlight rippled and obscured the ground. From a furnace, their souls’ found relief in sweaty palms. For each laborer a satchel of seeds and broken steel. In the acreage’s furrows workers planted seeds for the harvest. Against an erected cobblestone wall between City pulverized gravel and the wheat field’s soil, soldiers braced between earth and ragged rampart, feet entrenched; their fractured swords wavered in stifling air. City men and women fled that place for rescue; the dwellers died on their way, their husks clumped— forming dry, lost, grassy patches —others reached the stones thirsting, whom farmhands pulled over their defense against the City. Up the laborers’ vigor floated in smoke for the fleeting and passing, quick they carried away from the wall the slain adorned in wounds and white robes to the Farmer’s cemetery. I saw shovels staked moist dirt mounds open graves hollowed-out rows forged swords thrust in ground— tombstones etched without name.