Aftershock

L'Aquila Earthquake, 2009

No one sleeps in this kind of darkness.
 
Bare fields, empty, dismantled houses,
people rest on stiff cots beside their neighbors—
forgotten, lost bodies.
A mother wails in the night.
Her cries echo like the constant swallowing
of broken waves. She lies motionless,
swaddles her child; cradles him
in the space between her chest and belly,
his brown hair, greasy strands of it caught 
inside the cracked skin of her worn fingers.
 
All evening, grass fields roar in the whipping air.