The Day They Came
You were only six years old;
when they came for you —
that’s not right.
They came for me
but I was gone.
But they found you
and my wife
alone.
All I saw was the blood;
then all went black.
It took three days before my tongue
could find its way to form a word.
Before were groans and cries,
words without translation.
They say I screamed
incessantly:
someone insane —
perhaps it’s true,
for sanity could not
explain what it was
I must have seen.
Bathed in red all alone,
clothed only in
my grief and pain,
I rocked back and forth.
Some have said that I
could not be moved.
They had to pull and pry
your mother from my arms.
I have no memory.
It’s just as well:
no one speaks
of what they saw.
But you were gone with the night.
And they had plans for a child.
Darryl Willis 2020
This is poem 2 for a collection entitled What Was Lost In The Dark: tales from the apocalypse. This is a work of poetic fiction.
