Again

                                                        At an American Friends Service Committee
                            “Eyes Wide Open” exhibit, 2012

In the Quaker meeting room
we walk a ragged maze
of worn black Army boots.
Tags identify each pair:
Fallen owner's name, home town.
Some, simply “Name Withheld."

            On the floor outside the room,
            fifty symbolic donated pairs:
            shoes, sandals, slippers . . .
            all styles, colors, sizes . . .
            each pair honoring, by name and age,
            an Iraqi civilian, lost . . .
            the smallest, “2 years old,” “1 year” . . .
            tiny red sneakers, “4 months.”

A lesson in math:
50-to-1 Iraqi dead to ours.

A notebook on a table encourages
viewers' thoughts on the exhibit.

            I write instead a memory:
            Hiroshima Peace Museum . . .
            behind glass, children’s lunchboxes,
            the contents charred and fused . . .

            a human shadow burned onto brick
            where someone who walked by
            on August 6, 1945, instantly
            vanished—name, shoes and all.

            In the notebook outside
            that Hiroshima hall,
            over and over, visitors vowed:
            Never again.
            Among those signatures, I added mine.

Tonight,
at this memorial of boots and shoes,
again, I sign.