Disposal troops

With our media eyes we watch them under the ruined eyebrows
of brooding villages, skulls of houses stripped by witless shells,
artillery, mortars and bombs and the idiot gavotte of ricochets;
by anonymous cemeteries of broken molars chiselled with no names.

At the desert’s edge where the wild meets with abandonment
and the sky melts to stone, we watch them.
They are methodical and cautious from necessity.
They are like virgins, anxious on post-nuptial linen.

They are tight as hymens – and as pierceable.

They are the cleaners – in the yawn of doorways to the homes
that are no more – susceptible to mine or booby-trap or roadside bomb
or drizzle of masonry or shrill ordnance or assassin sniping
or the capricious butcher’s knife; to the idiot garrotte of destiny.
They clean with apologetic eyes and cold maternal lips apocalyptically,
camouflaged in sand and all the thousand cadences of sand.

In threes and fours and taut (as in pursuit of ptarmigan)
they cock their guns and inch into their non-virtual reality
where death brandishes a wink from every shadow
and, maiming, coughs politely from behind cupped hands
and every standing stone is but an hourglass of sand
through which time jets in impenitent eternities.

And, as they sift through dust like fetished archaeologists
and, in a swift pathology, uncover bones, we watch them.
They, or the survivors of them, deflowered, lurch away:
their hands never again quite unbloodied;
their eyes never again quite unblinded.
There are other ruined bastions to clean

and other brooding graveyards to endure.

Theirs is a noble cause: an ignoble world applauds them
but, having pocketed their pittances, they (disregarded) die.
The villager comes home and, having pocketed the largesse
of rotted parliaments and non-governmental agencies, rebuilds.
Later, the hourglass they bequeathed (but only through fatigue) implodes
and a capricious ammunition shall eviscerate the children.