Occupied the Empty Houses

We moved secretly through the streets at night.

Food was taken in doorways and shallow alcoves.

Tattoos were performed on the open floors of abandoned factories.

Bedecked with cloth and feathers.

Our vehicles ran not on benzine but the oil given to us by those no longer needing.

We watched the stars revolve and the moons rise.

Animals accompanied us on our journeys knowing they would never be eaten.

Music and the constant trance of pipes.

Reflections of passing in roadside pools and river mirrors.

Slow days in apple orchards unworried by ownership or time.

The graves of our ancestors are in the sky.

Ours shall be unfindable.

Between a sun not yet seen and the lake of our skins.

There the burials will take place in trees and other wooded creatures.

There will be no piles of ash or breaking open of caskets

But instead a keeping of each flame around a circle as yet unbroken.