THE ACCOUNTANT

MY POEM TODAY. The Great Grief continues.


THE ACCOUNTANT


Sunny and cold. A nuthatch lands on the dead cherry and begins a close inspection of the limbs, dapper as an accountant in his gray suit.---Dave Bonta, The Morning Porch

Almost invisible, he plods quickly through carrion
piled helter-skelter on the bulldozed hillock. Dead
heads, dead eyes, dead limbs, dead legs, dead dead
form wreaths on the gaping holes in graveyards we
now know: Kampuchea, Syria, Maguindanao, Somalia,
Libya, Uganda, Nigeria, Botswana, Russian pogroms,
Mein Kampf railroads to the Herr’s crematoriums,
killing fields: he was there, “been there, done that”,
his austere and remote account of his unique job:
counter of the dead, keeper of the books, master
of the morgues, “keep them coming while we could,
death shall have no dominion.” Nor a condominium.
Like the nuthatch, he walks with a limp in his dark,
gray suit, shrugs, leaps over the dead cherry and
stifles a long, deep yawn, and fixes his ledger pages.


— Albert B, Casuga