Basket

A reed basket hangs on the line
with flowers stuffed in its mouth,
the basket is the skeleton of a marsh,
the flowers cascading corpses,
the victims of mass murder by sickle and scythe.

Spirits of the dead at a prairie graveyard
lean against a fence rail
and think on friends who never returned
from an evening stroll.

Death thinks on a corpse
lost in a marsh, a corpse out of the box.
At the end of a row of gravestones
a basket ceremony fills in the blank,
murder reveres death.