Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray* Each one than what had gone before Dust and ash everywhere. Charted and limbless trunks of Trees stretching away on every side Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands Of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles Whining thinly in the wind The shape of a city stood in the grayness Like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste Nothing to see the cold and the silence If only my heart were stone. No sign of life. The blackness she woke to on those nights Was sightless and impenetrable A blackness to hurt your ears with listening No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees She rose and stood toffering in that Cold autistic dark with her arms Out held balance… For falling… For falling… For falling…